Lisa Rombout MSc

Bio

I’m a human specimen interested in quite a lot of things. My interests include creative coding, cyborgs, virtual reality, regular reality, literature, spoken-word, art, fairy-tales, whiskey and the human brain. I am currently underlining this multidisciplinary madness by working towards a PhD in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, more specifically in social embodiment. I also organize creative coding meetups and hackathons, and teach programming to both children and adults. Sometimes I stand in front of rooms of people and talk about coding, VR, how weird our brain can be, and hacking intimacy through tech.

Expertise

Current research focus is social embodiment - how does our brain know what is part of our body and what not, and how does this process influence social interaction?

Apart from this, I teach virtual and augmented reality, programming, and working with hardware such as the Arduino.

I've also worked on projects related to intimacy & technology, the placebo effect, games for mental health, and tech community building.

Teaching

I've been teaching for >10 years and in that time, I've come to the conclusion that children have it all figured out: when you tell them that we're going to make a video-game together, they are over the moon and immediately want to start. Adults however are often a bit scared that they won't be able to do it. My goal is to show how accessible modern technology can be, without using too much jargon or making things more complex than needed. Let's build something awesome!

Additionally, I think it's very important to think a bit further about the awesome things you're building, and consider the human and societal implications of them. The only thing more interesting than technology is what people will do with that technology.

Courses

• Human-Computer Interaction for CSAI
• Autonomous Systems
• Introduction to Programming

Collaboration

I've worked together with several companies and artistic projects to advise on  current and future applications of technology and the ripple-out effects they can have on society. I'm very interested in interdisciplinary research and the approach to a problem from multiple angles.

Recent publications

1. A Classification of Perceptual Sensitivity

   Rombout, L., & Postma, M. (2022). A Classification of Perceptual Sensitivity. Manuscript in preparation.

2. Disentangling the effects of matching content and simultaneous speech…

   Rombout, L., & Safarova, M. (Accepted/In press). Disentangling the effects of matching content and simultaneous speech on phonetic adaptation. Auditory Perception & Cognition, 5(1-2), 107-128.

3. Envoiced and Embodied - An Exploration of Voice Illusions with and wi…

   Rombout, L. (2022). Envoiced and Embodied: An Exploration of Voice Illusions with and without a Virtual Body. Manuscript in preparation.

4. The Effects of Ingroup Bias on Public Speaking Anxiety in Virtual Rea…

   Biesmans, L. EJ., van Hees, P. JM., Rombout, L., Alimardani, M., & Fukuda, E. (2020). The Effects of Ingroup Bias on Public Speaking Anxiety in Virtual Reality. 17-24. Paper presented at 15th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2020).

5. Exploring a Voice Illusion

   Rombout, L., & Postma, M. (2019). Exploring a Voice Illusion. In 2019 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII) (8 ed.). IEEE.