My area of expertise is Human Computer Interaction (HCI) with focus on interaction design, speech/language interaction, user experience (UX) and AI. In my work, I am mainly focusing on designing, implementing and evaluating interactive AI  systems, such as chatbots, virtual agents and social robots.

Currently, I am a Research Scientist in the Dialogue Technology Group (Human Language Department) at A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research. During this time, I had the opportunity to work for two start-up companies within a technology transfer program funded by A*STAR: Pestech Holding (S) Pte Ltd, a company that uses A.I. to monitor rodents and for whom I worked as UX expert; Lexagle, a software company specialized in legal analytics for whom I worked as a NLP data analyst and design consultant.  Previously, I worked as usability expert at NT-Ware (Cannon Group) and as Research Assistant in Human Media Interaction group at University of Twente. During my studies, I also worked as intern at IBM Speech Lab and collaborated with ITwin Singapore.

I pursued my doctoral degree in HCI at the University of Twente (The Netherlands) and completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Bucharest (Romania) and Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) in Computer Science, Linguistics, Communication and Economics. 

I am fluent in six languages and in my free time, I am a keen art enthusiast with an eye for colour and beauty. Some of my painting & artworks can be seen here.

I’m inspired by the fact that new technologies are heterogeneous mixtures of knowledge from different areas and I hope with my varied academic background, work experience and artistic inclinations to make a contribution to their developmen