Multimodal Signals: Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues


Book Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the COST Action 2102 and euCognition supported international school on Multimodal Signals: "Cognitive and Algorithmic Issues" held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, in April 2008. The 34 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from participants’ contributions and invited lectures given at the workshop. The volume is organized in two parts; the first on Interactive and Unsupervised Multimodal Systems contains 14 papers. The papers deal with the theoretical and computational issue of defining algorithms, programming languages, and determinist models to recognize and synthesize multimodal signals. These are facial and vocal expressions of emotions, tones of voice, gestures, eye contact, spatial arrangements, patterns of touch, expressive movements, writing patterns, and cultural differences, in anticipation of the implementation of intelligent avatars and interactive dialogue systems that could be exploited to improve user access to future telecommunication services. The second part of the volume, on Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Signals, presents 20 original studies devoted to the modeling of timing synchronisation between speech production, gestures, facial and head movements in human communicative expressions and on their mutual contribution for an effective communication.




Development of Multimodal Interfaces: Active Listening and Synchrony


Book Description

The themes of the papers presented in this book emphasize theoretical and practical issues for modelling human-machine interaction, ranging from the attempt in describing “the spacing and orientation in co-present interaction” to the effort for developing multimodal interfaces, collecting and analysing interaction data and emergent behaviour as well as analysing the use of nonverbal and pragmatic elements of exchanges, implementing discourse control and virtual agents and using active listening in computer speech processing.




Social Influence, Power, and Multimodal Communication


Book Description

Social Influence, Power, and Multimodal Communication reveals how democratic leaders and dictators exploit multimodal communication to convince or seduce their audiences, using words, voice, gesture, face, gaze, and posture to boast about their merits or insult and ridicule rivals. Poggi and D'Errico explore questions such as what is charisma, and how do we perceive it in a leader? And how do politicians display their dominance over opponents, or discredit them in TV debates and social media? Starting from a sociocognitive model of social interaction, observational studies reveal the rhetoric of words, hands, and faces, explaining how to see beyond their literal meanings, while experimental studies test their uses and persuasive effects. The authors affirm that multimodality helps others to influence us through displays of dominance, and by undermining our power through comments, insults, irony, ridicule, and parody. The devices of social influence and its multimodal management are illuminated, giving readers insight into how people influence others’ lives by using body language and verbal communication, either explicitly or in subtle but inexorable ways. This fascinating text is a superb resource for students of psychology, communication, pragmatics, and political sciences, as well as for school teachers, politicians, spin doctors, active citizenship workers, and anyone seeking to understand how communicative power is managed, both in politics and everyday social contexts.




The Handbook of Multimodal-Multisensor Interfaces, Volume 3


Book Description

The Handbook of Multimodal-Multisensor Interfaces provides the first authoritative resource on what has become the dominant paradigm for new computer interfaces-user input involving new media (speech, multi-touch, hand and body gestures, facial expressions, writing) embedded in multimodal-multisensor interfaces. This three-volume handbook is written by international experts and pioneers in the field. It provides a textbook, reference, and technology roadmap for professionals working in this and related areas. This third volume focuses on state-of-the-art multimodal language and dialogue processing, including semantic integration of modalities. The development of increasingly expressive embodied agents and robots has become an active test bed for coordinating multimodal dialogue input and output, including processing of language and nonverbal communication. In addition, major application areas are featured for commercializing multimodal-multisensor systems, including automotive, robotic, manufacturing, machine translation, banking, communications, and others. These systems rely heavily on software tools, data resources, and international standards to facilitate their development. For insights into the future, emerging multimodal-multisensor technology trends are highlighted in medicine, robotics, interaction with smart spaces, and similar areas. Finally, this volume discusses the societal impact of more widespread adoption of these systems, such as privacy risks and how to mitigate them. The handbook chapters provide a number of walk-through examples of system design and processing, information on practical resources for developing and evaluating new systems, and terminology and tutorial support for mastering this emerging field. In the final section of this volume, experts exchange views on a timely and controversial challenge topic, and how they believe multimodal-multisensor interfaces need to be equipped to most effectively advance human performance during the next decade.




The Human Face of Ambient Intelligence


Book Description

As a socially disruptive technology, Ambient Intelligence is ultimately directed towards humans and targeted at the mundane life made of an infinite richness of circumstances that cannot fully be considered and easily be anticipated. Most books, however, focus their analysis on, or deal largely with, the advancement of the technology and its potential only. This book offers a fresh, up–to–date, and holistic approach to Ambient Intelligence. As such, it addresses the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary aspects of the rapidly evolving field of Ambient Intelligence by seamlessly integrating and fusing it with artificial intelligence, cognitive science and psychology, social sciences, and humanities. It is divided into two main parts: Part 1 is about different permutations of enabling technologies as well as core computational capabilities, namely context awareness, implicit and natural interaction, and intelligent behavior. It details the existing and upcoming prerequisite technologies, and elucidates the application and convergence of major current and future computing trends. Part 2 is an accessible review and synthesis of the latest research in the human-directed sciences and computing and how these are intricately interrelated in the realm of Ambient Intelligence. It deals with the state–of–the–art human–inspired applications which show human-like understanding and exhibit intelligent behavior in relation to a variety of aspects of human functioning – states and processes. It describes and elaborates on the rich potential of Ambient Intelligence from a variety of interrelated perspectives and the plethora of challenges and bottlenecks involved in making Ambient Intelligence a reality, and also discusses the established knowledge and recent discoveries in the human–directed sciences and their application and convergence in the ambit of Ambient Intelligence computing. This seminal reference work is the most comprehensive of its kind, and will prove invaluable to students, researchers, and professionals across both computing and the human-directed sciences.




Human-Centric Interfaces for Ambient Intelligence


Book Description

To create truly effective human-centric ambient intelligence systems both engineering and computing methods are needed. This is the first book to bridge data processing and intelligent reasoning methods for the creation of human-centered ambient intelligence systems. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book covers topics such as multi-modal interfaces, human-computer interaction, smart environments and pervasive computing, addressing principles, paradigms, methods and applications. This book will be an ideal reference for university researchers, R&D engineers, computer engineers, and graduate students working in signal, speech and video processing, multi-modal interfaces, human-computer interaction and applications of ambient intelligence. Hamid Aghajan is a Professor of Electrical Engineering (consulting) at Stanford University, USA. His research is on user-centric vision applications in smart homes, assisted living / well being, smart meetings, and avatar-based social interactions. He is Editor-in-Chief of "Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments", has chaired ACM/IEEE ICDSC 2008, and organized workshops/sessions/tutorials at ECCV, ACM MM, FG, ECAI, ICASSP, CVPR. Juan Carlos Augusto is a Lecturer at the University of Ulster, UK. He is conducting research on Smart Homes and Classrooms. He has given tutorials at IJCAI'07 and AAAI'08. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Book Series on "Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments" and the "Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments". He has co-Chaired ICOST'06, AITAmI'06/07/08, and is Workshops Chair for IE'09. Ramón López-Cózar Delgado is a Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science and Telecommunications of the University of Granada, Spain. His research interests include speech recognition and understanding, dialogue management and Ambient Intelligence. He is a member of ISCA (International Speech Communication Association), SEPLN (Spanish Society on Natural Language Processing) and AIPO (Spanish Society on HCI). - Integrates engineering and computing methods that are essential for designing and implementing highly effective ambient intelligence systems - Contains contributions from the world's leading experts in academia and industry - Gives a complete overview of the principles, paradigms and applications of human-centric ambient intelligence systems




Statistical Language and Speech Processing


Book Description

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing, SLSP 2019, held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in October 2019. The 25 full papers presented together with one invited paper in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 48 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Dialogue and Spoken Language Understanding; Language Analysis and Generation; Speech Analysis and Synthesis; Speech Recognition; Text Analysis and Classification.




Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions


Book Description

This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 International Conference on “Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions” held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 15–18, 2008. The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, www. cost. esf. org/domains_actions/ict) in the - main of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the research advances developed within COST Action 2102: “Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication” http://cost2102. cs. stir. ac. uk. COST 2102 research networking has contributed to modifying the conventional theoretical approach to the cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communi- tion changing the concept of face to face communication with that of body to body communication as well as developing the idea of embodied information. Information is no longer the result of a difference in perception and is no longer measured in terms of quantity of stimuli, since the research developed in COST 2102 has proved that human information processing is a nonlinear process that cannot be seen as the sum of the numerous pieces of information available. Considering simply the pieces of inf- mation available, results in a model of the receiver as a mere decoder, and produces a huge simplification of the communication process.




Language and Emotion. Volume 1


Book Description

The Handbook consists of four major sections. Each section is introduced by a main article: Theories of Emotion – General Aspects Perspectives in Communication Theory, Semiotics, and Linguistics Perspectives on Language and Emotion in Cultural Studies Interdisciplinary and Applied Perspectives The first section presents interdisciplinary emotion theories relevant for the field of language and communication research, including the history of emotion research. The second section focuses on the full range of emotion-related aspects in linguistics, semiotics, and communication theories. The next section focuses on cultural studies and language and emotion; emotions in arts and literature, as well as research on emotion in literary studies; and media and emotion. The final section covers different domains, social practices, and applications, such as society, policy, diplomacy, economics and business communication, religion and emotional language, the domain of affective computing in human-machine interaction, and language and emotion research for language education. Overall, this Handbook represents a comprehensive overview in a rich, diverse compendium never before published in this particular domain.




The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing


Book Description

"The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is a definitive reference in the burgeoning field of affective computing (AC), a multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and other disciplines. AC research explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems involving affect at their core. The volume features 41 chapters and is divided into five sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section 1 begins with the making of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. The following chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Section 2 examines affect detection or recognition, a commonly investigated area. Section 3 focuses on aspects of affect generation, including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures, and gestures. Cultural issues are also discussed. Section 4 focuses on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, formats for the representation of emotion, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues. Finally, Section 5 highlights applications of AC in such domains as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, health care, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. This compendium will prove suitable for use as a textbook and serve as a valuable resource for everyone with an interest in AC."--