Hi! I’m Ruben Janssens, a Postdoctoral Researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, working with Prof. Gabriel Skantze in the Department of Speech, Music, and Hearing (TMH).

In my research, I aim to improve and study the conversational abilities of social robots: how can they become more enjoyable and more fluent in dialogue? How can they effectively engage in challenging interactions such as multi-party dialogue, making effective use of multimodal information? Can we take inspiration from human cognition? And how can we measure what makes a good conversation?

I obtained my PhD degree in Computer Science Engineering in March 2026 from Ghent University (Belgium). In my PhD research, under the supervision of Prof. Tony Belpaeme and Prof. Thomas Demeester, I studied how social robots can adapt their conversations to visual input, ranging from situational awareness to personalisation and social signal processing.

Before starting my PhD research, I got a Master’s degree in Computer Science Engineering from Ghent University, in 2021, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence.

Want to get in touch? Use any of the channels listed below, or just send me an email at rubeja[at]kth[dot]se.