Peter Werkhoven

Research area

My research and teaching activities are about human perception and interaction in computer simulated worlds, focusing on:

• Tactile and brain-computer interfaces for navigating simulated worlds, e.g. How can you see with your skin? How can you move your avatar in a game by just thought?
• Affect, stress and body ownership in augmented reality, e.g. How to measure and control your stress level while playing a game? How to reconstruct a game designer’s goal based on game characteristics? How to let you feel and control a virtual or robotic arm as if it’s your own arm?
• Meaningful control of autonomous intelligent systems, e.g. How to tell autonomous (super) intelligent systems ‘what to do’, assuring alignment with ‘human values’? The impact of this research is in the application domains of effective training simulators, intuitive tele-operations and responsible development of AI systems.

These application domains are relevant for the TNO roadmaps ‘Operations & Human Factors’ and ‘Maritime & Offshore’ (tele-robotics) and  for the TNO Early Research Programs ‘i-Botics’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’.

Recent results

• The research on stress control in serious games (PhD work Benny van der Vijgh) resulted in GASICA, a system for the automated control of the stress state in therapy and training applications. The system has been employed by TNO in training simulators for the military.
• The research on body ownership in augmented reality (PhD work Nina Rosa) is input for the design of the tele-manipulation robot demonstrator developed in the i-Botics. The PhD-research of Nina Rosa studies human task performance in Augmented Reality when controlling a virtual hand (varying in ‘congruency’ with the real hand). She showed how experiencing body ownership ( ‘I own the hand’), agency (‘I control the hand’) influences task performance. This knowledge is relevant for effectively designing the tele-manipulation robot demonstrator developed in the i-Botics program.
• The PhD-research of Sjors Martens showed that a pursued city model of a game can be reconstructed based on an analysis of the action space of the game based on an analysis of the action space of the game. This so-called FIT method can be used to improve the design of the city games.
• The PhD-research of Nadisha-Marie Aliman addresses the so-called AI safety paradox and presents a systems-engineering approach called Orthogonality-based disentanglement of responsibilities for ethical Intelligent systems which tackles the control problem as well as the value alignment problem. In this approach manufacturers are responsible for the safety and security of the intelligent systems which they can implement using a utility-based approach with hybrid ‘self-aware’ utility maximizers combining e.g. symbolic reasoning/planning with deep learning sensors. Complementarily, the legislative as representation of the whole society is responsible for the selection of publicly available and quantitatively specified ethical goal functions. Additionally, she proposes a socio-technological feedback loop which employs AI-driven simulations in Augmented Reality for the challenging task of goal specification for AI-systems. This socio-technological feedback loop is illustrated for the case of specifying ethical goal functions for autonomous vehicles.

PhD supervision

• Nina Rosa-deJong, topic ‘Multimodality in augmented reality games’ (funded by NWO)

Top publications

• Nadisha-Marie Aliman, Leon Kester, Peter Werkhoven and Roman Yampolskiy (2019). Orthogonality-based disentanglement of responsibilities for ethical intelligent systems. Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-2019), August 6-9, 2019, Shenzhen, China. Doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-27005-6_3.
• Nina Rosa, Jean-Paul van Bommel, Wolfgang Hürst, Tanja Nijboer, Remco Veltkamp and Peter Werkhoven (2019). Embodying an extra virtual body in augmented reality. Proceedings of the 26th IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, March 23-27, Osaka, Japan. Doi: 10.1109/VR.2019.8798055.
• Peter Werkhoven, Leon Kester, & Mark Neerincx (2018). Telling autonomous systems what to do. In Proceedings of the 36th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE'18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 2. Doi: 10.1145/3232078.3232238.