Citadel

dr. K.P. Truong (Khiet)

Associate Professor
EEMCS-CS-HMI
Citadel H235
k.p.truong@utwente.nl
+31534893683
Business card

How people talk and understand each other has always fascinated me. The big question for me is how to develop technology that understands spoken language: how can we make automatic speech recognition more intelligent?. Besides what is said, there is also a lot of information in how something is said: aspects of physical, emotional, and mental states resonate in the voice, both consciously and unconsciously. I am particularly interested in the automatic interpretation of this implicit information, with the aim of, for example, enabling conversational agents (such as Siri) to respond more appropriately to children or older adults, or to develop apps that offer remote support to people suffering from depression.

After studying Linguistics (specialisation Language and Speech Technology) in Utrecht, I ended up at TNO where I investigated automatic emotion recognition in speech. Then I went to the University of Twente, Human Media Interaction where I am still working on the automatic analysis of nonverbal aspects in speech communication (e.g. laughing, backchanneling) in human-human, and human-machine interaction. Besides doing research I also teach speech processing, affective computing, and interaction technology.

Expertise

  • Computer Science

    • Robot
    • Annotation
    • Speech Recognition
    • Exploratory Study
    • Detection

  • Psychology

    • Emotion
    • Humans
    • Behavior

Organisations

My research mainly focuses on automatically analyzing and interpreting nonverbal aspects in speech communication that say something about how the conversation is going, and what someone's physical, socio-emotional, and mental state is. My goal is to make automatic speech recognition more intelligent. Among other things, I have worked on automatic detection of laughter, automatic emotion recognition in speech, and automatic generation of backchannels for artificial agents. Currently, I am supervising a number of PhD students who are researching multimodal emotion expression in older adults, and responsible design for child-robot interaction. I am also supervising master students in their research on technology for vulnerable people (e.g. people with dementia, people with multiple disabilities), and human-robot interaction.

You can also read more about my research here https://www.utwente.nl/en/research/researchers/featured-scientists/truong/index/ and on my personal website http://khiettruong.space/ 

Publications

2026

Emotional experiences and expressions in reminiscence: A multimodal analysis of emotional memories in older adults (2026)[Thesis › PhD Thesis - Research UT, graduation UT]. University of Twente. Nazareth, D. S.https://doi.org/10.3990/1.9789036569828

2025

The role of voice and appearance in gender perception of speaking robots (2025)In 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2025 (pp. 178-183) (IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Communication (ROMAN); Vol. 2025). IEEE. van Veen, S., Willemse, C., Garcia Goo, H. & Truong, K. P.https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN63969.2025.11217687Do I Sound as Capable as I Look?: Impact of Robot Communication Style and Appearance on User Perception (2025)In Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (pp. 1-4). Article 44. ACM Press. Kavuza, N. F., Garcia Goo, H. & Truong, K. P.https://doi.org/10.1145/3717511.3749305Remembering past emotions: How emotion expressions are linked to memory reappraisal (2025)PLoS ONE, 20(9). Article e0332575. Nazareth, D. S., Truong, K. P., Heylen, D., Kok, P. & Westerhof, G. J.https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0332575Enhancing Transcripts of Open-Source Automatic Speech Recognition Models Through Fine-Tuning with Laughter and Speech-Laugh (2025)In Interspeech 2025 (pp. 4513-4517). Ho, P. H., Bălan, D. A., Heylen, D. K. J. & Truong, K. P.https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2025-2193Capturing the complexity of laughter: Acquisition, annotation and analysis of laughter data in social signal processing (2025)[Thesis › PhD Thesis - Research UT, graduation UT]. University of Twente. Jansen, M.-P.https://doi.org/10.3990/1.9789036566940Age Against the Machine: How Age Relates to Listeners' Ability to Recognize Emotions in Robots' Semantic-Free Utterances (2025)IEEE transactions on affective computing (E-pub ahead of print/First online). Goo, H. G., Ermers, L., Janse, E., Kolkmeier, J., Schadenberg, B., Evers, V. & Truong, K. P.https://doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2025.3568595Being Sorry is the Hardest Thing: How Robots can Apologize and Learn from Mistakes to Restore People’s Trust (2025)In CHI EA 2025 - Extended Abstracts of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Article 94. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Goo, H. G., Schadenberg, B. R., Kolkmeier, J., Truong, K. P. & Evers, V.https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3719739Ask and You Shall Find: How Suggestions by a Conversational Robot Assist Children with Information Search (2025)In Social Robotics - 16th International Conference, ICSR + AI 2024, Proceedings (pp. 417-430) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; Vol. 15563 LNAI). Springer. Beelen, T., Ordelman, R., Truong, K. P., Evers, V. & Huibers, T.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-3525-2_35Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Automatic Speech Recognition systems for Dutch (2025)[Contribution to conference › Poster] 3rd Dutch Speech Tech Day 2025. Bălan, D. A., Truong, K. P. & Ordelman, R. J. F.

Research profiles

Affiliated study programs

Courses academic year 2025/2026

Courses in the current academic year are added at the moment they are finalised in the Osiris system. Therefore it is possible that the list is not yet complete for the whole academic year.

Courses academic year 2024/2025

Current projects

Advancing technology for multimodal analysis of emotion expression in dementia

Multimodal analysis of emotional expression in spoken memories of older adults, lifestory books, reminiscence therapy

Children and AI: talking trust and responsible spoken search

CHATTERS

Responsible design in child-robot-media interaction, spoken interaction between child and conversational agent

4TU Humans & Technology: Smart Social Systems and Spaces for Living Well

Social signal processing and affective computing in speech

Finished projects

EU-FP7 SQUIRREL (Clearing Clutter Bit by Bit)

Robot that helps children tidying up, social signal processing in child-robot interaction,

COMMIT P3 SENSEI

Exercise intensity detection through voice, running app

EU-FP7 SSPNet (Social Signal Processing Network)

Automatic analysis of laughter, backchannel generation, speech synchrony

Address

University of Twente

Citadel (building no. 09), room H235
Hallenweg 15
7522 NH Enschede
Netherlands

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