Johan HoornProfessor
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Prof. Hoorn holds two PhD degrees from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, one in General and Comparative Literature and the other one in Computer Science . Prof. Hoorn has worked in five different schools including Humanities, Psychology, Computer Science, Life Science, and Social Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. From 2007 to 2012, he was the Managing Director of the research institute, Center of Advanced Media Research Amsterdam (CAMeRA). He was the co-founder of THNK, an international top school for creative leadership and the founding father of the Social Robotics Pop-up Lab for co-designing social robots with academia, industry, arts, and societal partners. In different consortia, Prof. Hoorn helped raise over HK$60M of funding of which HK$36M went to his former university.

Central themes in Prof. Hoorn’s work are the study of creativity and virtuality to design emotionally intelligent agents, conversational AI, and social robots. He has been awarded a Burgen Scholarship of the Academia Europaea for “excellent academic achievement”, a Lorentz Fellowship of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS). He was the Principal Investigator of the prizewinning Services of Electro-Mechanical Care Agencies (SELEMCA) project within the national Creative Industry Scientific Programme (CRISP). Prof. Hoorn has also obtained the KNAW Eureka Award for scientific outreach awarded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) with the documentary, Alice Cares which is about robot eldercare with Sander Burger as director. Alice Cares was on national television and is shown around the globe in movie theatres and during festivals in the UK, Germany, New Zealand and Israel.