J.P. de Ruiter
J.P. de Ruiter is a cognitive scientist and psycholinguist whose primary research focus is on the cognitive foundations of human communication. At Tufts, he is a bridge professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Computer Science and Psychology. Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Psychology at the University of Cologne, and later as a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. From 2009 to 2016, de Ruiter was Chair of Psycholinguistics at Bielefeld University, Germany, where he founded the Natural Communication HD Lab.
J.P. de Ruiter aims to improve our understanding about how humans and artificial agents can use language, gesture, and other multimodal and nonverbal signals to effectively communicate with each other. His research focuses on the computational processes involved in conversational turn-taking, speech accompanying gesture, and intention recognition in communication. His research interests include philosophy of science, artificial intelligence, and ethnostatistics. De Ruiter has also initiated and/or been involved in several projects in social robotics, working on the encoding and decoding of social signals and communicative intentions in embodied artificial systems.