Jean Botev

This section provides information about my academic activities, including research projects, awards, chairing duties, as well as committee and board memberships.

PROJECTS

Virtual Reality Body Image Intervention and Assessment Suite (VR BIAS). Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg, 2023-today. ▾

The VR BIAS project explores novel virtual-reality-based approaches to improve body image, i.e., how someone perceives, feels, and thinks about their body. Employing different variations of body illusions and distinct ways to assess distorted perceptions of the body, the project focuses on measuring how strongly participants experience avatar embodiment, how this improves their body image, and how they generally feel during the experience, by combining self-report and behavioral assessments with state-of-the-art psychophysiology. VR BIAS will develop innovative tools and techniques for research and clinical practice and contribute to current psychological and neurobiological theories of body image disturbance and eating disorders.

Modulating Human Subjective Time Experience (ChronoPilot). European Commission / Horizon 2020 FET-Open Challenging Current Thinking, 2021-today. ▾

The ChronoPilot project focuses on the different dimensions of time perception in individuals and groups of humans, as well as in hybrid systems consisting of humans and machines, such as software agents and robots. The project's goal is to create a time modulation toolkit and prototype technology capable of improving both the quality and the process of decision-making by extending/compressing human subjective time adaptively, whenever required. Exploring novel methods in cognitive science and applying mediated-reality technologies such as virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) and body sensors to different human sensory channels, the ChronoPilot team will develop innovative solutions to control time perception plasticity.

Delegation of Decision-Making to Autonomous Agents in Socio-Technical Systems (DELICIOS). Research Foundation - Flanders / Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg, 2019-2023. ▾

With digital assistance and interconnectivity available ubiquitously, humans will increasingly delegate their social, economic or data-related transactions to artificial autonomous agents, both for reasons of convenience or complexity. This multidisciplinary project investigates possible designs and questions of trust or acceptance, using computational agent models that are validated in behavioural experiments as well as virtual and augmented reality technologies to examine aspects of representation and socio-technical acceptance.

Collaborative Context-Aware Mobile Training and Exploration (CollaTrEx). University of Luxembourg, 2015-today. ▾

The CollaTrEx project aims at providing an integrated framework for collaborative context-aware mobile exploration and training with a focus on the in-situ collaboration within groups of learners engaging in varied educational activities. The advantages and opportunities of context-aware mobile learning are widely recognized but modern mobile devices offer an enormous potential beyond establishing precise spatio-temporal context. The multitude of sensors, as well as advanced recording and networking capabilities, call for increased interactivity and collaboration. However, instead of harnessing these capabilities to full effect for a genuinely collaborative and interactive mobile learning experience, they are often left unexploited.

Collaborative Compound Document Authoring and Annotation (CoCoDA²). University of Luxembourg, 2013-2017. ▾

The CoCoDA² project focuses on collaboration in compound document systems based on a flexible and more fine-grained document handling than the one provided by existing file abstractions. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, the efficient collaborative authoring as well as the intra- and inter-item annotation of compound documents particularly for geographically remote users is investigated. This involves areas of research ranging from network science over concurrency control with operational transformation to the social sciences. The CoCoDA² project thus aims at contributing to the general understanding of how the structure of compound documents and collaborative aspects – such as the simultaneous multi-user authoring process itself or the concomitant sharing of semantic data – interact and integrate.

Universality and Self-Organization in Next-Generation Distributed Environments (UNISON). Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg / University of Luxembourg, 2009-2011. ▾

Research on complex networks has led to a number of interesting findings in various scientific areas. These display underlying principles that, by virtue of their universal character, can be employed for the design of self-organizing systems. Originating from statistical mechanics, there is a notable paradigm shift towards more stochastic-oriented approaches to complex networks. This allows quantitative and qualitative statements to be made based on an essential set of global parameters. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, this research project investigates how such principles can be utilized to enable the efficient provision of massively distributed, scalable and interactive applications whose requirements cannot be met by existing, prevailingly deterministic architectures.