Dirk Heylen is professor Socially Intelligent Computing at the University of Twente. His research interests cover both the machine analysis of human(conversational) behaviour and the generation of human-like (conversational) behaviour by virtual agents and robots. He is especially interested in the nonverbal and paraverbal aspects of dialogue and what these signals reveal about the mental state (cognitive, affective, social). These topics are explored both from a computational perspective and as basic research in the humanities, reflecting my training as a computational linguist.