[Dutch-chapter] September 9, Symposium on Observing and Generating Human Motion

[Dennis Reidsma]

Dear Reader,

it is our pleasure to invite you to the symposium "Observing and 
Generating Human Motion", held on September 9 on the occasion of the PhD 
defense of Herwin van Welbergen. Four internationally renown speakers 
will present their work on cognition models and personality types for 
virtual agents and monitoring and tracking of human motion.

Following the symposium, Herwin van Welbergen will give a short 
introduction of the work that he did in the past few years, concerning 
"Behavior Generation for Interpersonal Coordination with Virtual 
Humans". Immediately thereafter, the official defense will take place.

You are kindly invited to attend the symposium as well as the 
introduction and defense. Registration is not mandatory; however, if you 
announce your intention to participate we can take it into account when 
organizing coffee and additional copies of the thesis.

Date: September 9
Location: University of Twente

Program:
13:00 - 15:30 : Symposium, Room H327, Building Citadel
16:30 - 16:45 : Informal introduction by Herwin van Welbergen, Room WA4, 
Building Waaier
16:45 : PhD Defense Herwin van Welbergen, Room WA4, Building Waaier

Speakers:
Michael Neff (US) -- Generation of personality types for virtual agents
Robby Tan (NL) -- Multiple people tracking from multiple cameras
Peter Veltink (NL) -- Monitoring daily-life physical interaction between 
people and their environments
Stefan Kopp (DE) -- Models of human communication and cognition

Summaries of the talks:
===========
Michael Neff, University of California, US: generation of personality 
types for virtual agents

A key goal in agent research is to be able to generate multi-modal 
characters that can reflect a particular personality. Michael Neff will 
talk about his recent work on non-verbal and verbal generation of 
particular personality types. Based on psychological literature on the 
relation between certain verbal and non-verbal behaviors, such as 
self-adaptors and language variation, and personality models such as the 
Big Five model, Michael Neff and his colleagues have experimented with 
changing the perceived personality of a virtual agent.

===========
Robby Tan, Utrecht University: multiple people tracking from multiple 
cameras

Multiple people tracking from multiple cameras benefits many 
applications in computer vision. However, using the existing methods, 
various problems such as inter-person occlusions still degrade the 
position estimations. In our research, we attempt to solve the problems 
by analyzing the view visibility and ranking the reliability of the cues 
from 2D views. We combine the visibility with the smoothness constraints 
into a probability framework, which offers a more flexible and robust 
estimation. Aside from that, we also introduce the 2D reference lines to 
estimate the 2D position of every person in the input images. These 
lines are able to estimate more accurate and robust 2D positions. We 
quantitatively evaluate our method by using both our own multiple-people 
data set and a public data set. The evaluation and experimental results 
on the standard data set show that our methods considerably improve the 
accuracy.

===========
Peter Veltink, University of Twente: Monitoring daily-life physical 
interaction between people and their environments

Continuous daily-life monitoring of the functional activities of stroke 
survivors in their physical interaction with the environment is 
essential for optimal guidance of rehabilitation therapy by medical 
professionals and coaching of the patient. Such performance information 
cannot be obtained with present monitoring systems. Human performance 
and interaction with the environment is also important in other fields 
like ergonomics and sports. It is the objective of our current research 
to develop and validate sensing systems and algorithms for monitoring 
interactions with the environment during daily-life. In the FreeMotion 
project methods have been developed to monitor balance control using 
shoes instrumented with inertial and force sensors. In our current STW 
project PowerSensor, we develop methods to monitor power exchange 
between the human body and the environment and dynamic characteristics 
of the environment using a glove instrumented with inertial and force 
sensing. In our new EU project INTERACTION, we develop and evaluate a 
system to monitor daily physical interaction with the environment and 
task performance after stroke. The system will be unobtrusively 
integrated in clothing (e-textile), include fabric-based and distributed 
inertial sensing, and provide telemonitoring and adaptive on-body 
feedback capabilities. Telesupervision facilities will enable a clinical 
expert at a distance to evaluate performance effectively, coach the 
patient and influence training.

===========
Stefan Kopp, Bielefeld University, Germany: models of human 
communication and cognition

The Sociable Agents Group at Bielefeld University develops technical 
systems that can join humans naturally. Using 3D virtual humans or 
humanoid robots, this research investigates how models of human 
communication and cognition can be transferred to machines in order to 
make them conversational, cooperative, adaptive and companionable. I 
will give an overview of ongoing work on (1) modeling speech and gesture 
and studying their effects, (2) modeling feedback understanding to 
unveil the interlocutor's degree of understanding and responding by 
adaptation of own linguistic behavior, (3) modeling online learning and 
recognition of nonverbal behavior.
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