[Dutch-chapter] Call for Participation: Summer Workshop Project on Continuous Interaction for ECAs

Tue Jan 26 16:27:39 UTC 2010

Call for Participation:

Summer Workshop Project on Continuous Interaction for ECAs
on the 6th Intl. Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, July 12th - August 6th, 2010

In the framework of the eNTERFACE Summer Workshop, a team of
enthusiastic researchers will come together to work on this project that
integrates the recognition and synthesis of certain social signals. 

The main objective of this project is to develop an Embodied
Conversational Agent able to receive and to handle certain kinds of
feedback, backchannel and interruptions from the user. We plan on
modeling and implementing the sensing, interaction and generation for
what we call continuous interaction. A continuous interactive ECA will
be able to perceive and generate conversational (non-)verbal behavior
fully in parallel, and can coordinate this behavior to perception
continuously -- a capability which is not present in most
state-of-the-art ECAs. We propose to do this specifically by looking at
feedback, backchannel and interruption behavior from the human user who
is listening to the ECA that serves as a virtual route guide. The ECA
will present information to the user in a multi-modal way. Actively
dealing with and responding to the above mentioned behaviors from the
user requires the ECA to be able to handle overlap, re-planning and
re-timing of expressions, ignoring attempts by the user to interrupt,
and abandoning of planned utterances (letting itself in effect be
interrupted). An evaluation study will show how the ECA developed is
perceived by human users in terms of politeness and certain personality
traits.

We invite researchers to participate in this project, and to work
together for 4 weeks on developing a continuous interactive ECA. These 4
weeks are a unique opportunity, especially for young researchers, to
work together in a multidisciplinary and international environment on
challenging man-machine interface issues. This year's eNTERFACE is held
in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, at the Intelligent Systems Lab of the
University of Amsterdam. The workshop includes some plenary lectures and
tutorials given by leading professionals in the field.

The deadline for participation is 15 February 2010. For more information
on how to apply and participate in our project, see
http://enterface10.science.uva.nl/ and the eNTERFACE CfP below. Make
sure that you select our project "Continuous Interaction for ECAs"
(project #04). 

For additional information visit
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/e10continuousinteraction or email the project
management team at e10continuousinteraction at ewi.utwente.nl. 

We hope to see you this summer in Amsterdam!

- Dennis Reidsma (Project Leader), Herwin van Welbergen, and Khiet
Truong (University of Twente)

On the eNTERFACE summer workshop
-----------------------------
eNTERFACE'10
the 6th Intl. Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces Amsterdam, the
Netherlands, July 12th - August 6th, 2010
-----------------------------
Call for Participation
-----------------------------
The eNTERFACE workshops aim at establishing a tradition of
collaborative, localized research and development work by gathering, in
a single place, a team of leading professionals in multimodal
man-machine interfaces together with students (both graduate and
undergraduate), to work on a pre-specified list of challenges, for 4
complete weeks. In this respect, it is an innovative and intensive
collaboration scheme, designed to allow researchers to integrate their
software tools, deploy demonstrators, collect novel databases, and work
side by side with a great number of experts.

Outcomes of synergy and success stories of past eNTERFACE Workshops held
in Mons (2005), Dubrovnik (2006), Istanbul (2007), Paris (2008), and
Genova (2009) can be seen at www.enterface.net. Intelligent Systems Lab
Amsterdam of the University of Amsterdam is organizing the 2010 edition
of the Workshop.

Senior researchers, PhD, MS, or undergraduate students interested in
participating at the Workshop should send their application by emailing
the Organizing Committee at a.a.salah at uva.nl on or before February 15,
2010. The application should contain:
-	A short CV
-	A list of three preferred projects to work on
-	A list of interests/skills to offer for these projects.
The workshop is free for all participants, but participants must procure
their own travel and accommodation expenses. Information about the venue
and accommodation are provided on the eNTERFACE'10 website:
http://enterface10.science.uva.nl
eNTERFACE'10 will welcome students, researchers, and seniors, working in
teams on the following projects:
#01 CoMediAnnotate: a usable multimodal annotation framework
#02 Looking around in a virtual world
#03 Parameterized user modelling of people with disabilities and
simulation of their behaviour in a virtual environment
#04 Continuous interaction for ECAs
#05 Multimodal Speaker Verification in NonStationary Noise Environments
#06 Vision based Hand Puppet
#07 Audio-visual speech recognition
#08 Affect-responsive interactive photo-frame
#09 Automatic Fingersign to Speech Translator

Full descriptions of the projects are available at:
http://enterface10.science.uva.nl/projectsTeams.php
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