Previous parlepraatjes

Praatjes in 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 |

28/08/03 Sean M. McNee
University of Minnesota Grouplens Research Project

22/09/03 Natasa Jovanovic Recognition of meeting actions using information obtained from different modalities -semantic approach-

22/09/03 Ruud Greven Animaties in de virtuele vergaderzaal

29/09/03 Andrei Malchanau Habitable Interfaces for Scientific Information

06/10/03 Zsófia Ruttkay, CWI Style in Gesture

13/10/03 Matthijs Ghijsen Politeness: A politeness model for natural language generation in a pedagogical environment

20/10/03 Eelco Herder From Browsing Behavior to Usability Matters

Grouplens Research Project

Sean M. McNee

Over the past decade, recommender systems employing collaborative filtering technology have evolved from research proofs-of-concept to commonplace components of e-commerce web sites and direct marketing. At the same time, research has moved forward to embrace more sophisticated algorithms and more detailed exploration of the user experience. This talk reviews recent highlights from the GroupLens Research Project, including an exploration of techniques for getting new users started in recommender systems, building confidence into a recommender system, user interface design issues, using citation webs to recommend research papers, and recent advances in algorithm design.

Sean M. McNee is a doctoral candidate from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. As a member of the GroupLens Research Project, he performs research in the areas of recommender systems, user modeling, and human-computer interaction. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in 2003, and his B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1998.

Recognition of meeting actions using information obtained from different modalities -semantic approach-

Natasa Jovanovic

Meetings play a very important role in everyday life. Meeting minutes can serve as a summary of a meeting but they can't provide a trustworthy representation of the meeting. Therefore it is very important to develop a system which will enable easy and efficient access to the meetings that have been archived as well as searching in a meeting archive by some criteria like topics, dates, participants, some specific actions during the meeting.

This is the main goal of the M4 (Multimodal Meeting Manager) project. It is concerned with the construction of a demonstration system to enable structuring, browsing and querying of an archive of automatically analysed meetings, using the outputs of a set of multimodal sensors. A meeting is a dynamic process which consists of group interactions between meeting participants. The group interactions in meetings are called meeting actions.

In this talk first I will give a short overview of the M4 project. Thereafter, I will present my ideas about modelling a meeting as a sequence of meeting actions using information obtained from different modalities using a semantic approach.

Animaties in de virtuele vergaderzaal

Ruud Greven

Op dit moment wordt er gewerkt aan een goede duidelijke methode om animaties weer te kunnen geven in de vergaderzaal. Dit gebeurd door vooraf gedefinieerde script in te lezen in en af te spelen. Tevens is het zo dat meerdere gecombineerd kunnen worden. Zo kunnen we bijvoorbeeld een humanoid laten aanwijzen en lopen tegelijk. In dit praatje zal ik gaan toelichten hoe de animatiescripts zijn opgebouwd. Hoe ze gemaakt kunnen worden en hoe ze vervolgens gebruikt en ingeladen kunnen worden. Zodat wellicht in de toekomst anderen dit ook kunnen gebruiken.

Habitable Interfaces for Scientific Information

Andrei Malchanau

Natural scientists such as physicists, biologists, chemists or geologists increasingly rely upon web-based information resources. Knowing one's way around thousands of web sites makes the difference between a mediocre and a reputable research group.

We point to the notion of the knowledge gap that can be seen as a combined effect of the lack of domain knowledge and lack of knowledge about information resources. In case of such a knowledge gap the model of communication that we propose will lead to new kinds of interaction with the heterogeneous information space. Habitable Interfaces will allow the organising of currently disparate archives into cohesive domain specific federations of information resources.

We expect that the effect of habitable interfaces on scientific communication and thus the validity of our model will be reflected in the changes in trust the user will have with respect to digital archives as a communication medium.

Style in Gesture

Zsófia Ruttkay, CWI

One would like to have means to make Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) to gesture in style that is, use different gestures according to their cultural, social background, gender, age and the situation (formal/informal) they are acting in. At CWI in my group we have been addressing two essential research questions to make this possible:

how to define and use nonverbal style?
how to provide easily (hand) gestures in a great stylistic variety?

In the first part of the talk, I will introduce our GESTYLE markup language, to annotate text which has to be spoken by ECAs, to prescribe the usage of hand-, head- and facial gestures accompanying the speech in order to augment the communication. The annotation ranges from low level (e.g. perform a specific gesture) to high level (e.g. take turn in a conversation) instructions. On top of that, and central to GESTYLE is the notion of style which determines the gesture repertoire and the gesturing manner of the ECA. By using GESTYLE, different aspects of gesturing of an ECA can be defined and tailored to the needs of different application situations or user groups. Some monologue from Hamlet will be used as demonstrator.

In the second half of the talk I will discuss how distributed logic programming can be used to define and control the hand gestures of ECAs, also in virtual worlds, by using the STEP language as an interface between the constructs of logic programming and the humanoid model defined in VRML. By using this framework, different gesture dictionaries can be defined and variants of a hand gesture, according to dynamically changing factors, can be generated on the fly. Some on-line demonstrators will be shown.

Politeness: A politeness model for natural language generation in a pedagogical environment

Matthijs Ghijsen

We describe how a politeness model is constructed and combined with a language generator in order to enable a pedagogical agent to adapt the linguistic usage to the social relation between the pedagogical agent and a student. First we will give a short introduction on the social intelligence project of USC/ISI. After that a politeness model will be constructed based on the theory by Brown and Levinson and the results of a small study on the relation between tutor politeness and student motivation. In the next part the architecture and implementation of the system are being discussed. The resulting system will enable a pedagogical agent use the politeness model while communicating with a student. At last an evaluation of the project goals and the planning will be given. The presentation concludes with a list of further work.

From Browsing Behavior to Usability Matters

Eelco Herder

At first sight, surfing on the Internet is a relatively easy task. However, many users experience difficulties in finding the information they need, or they even 'get lost' in a web site by lack of context. User tracking and analyis of their navigation paths are suitable methods for detecting such usability matters. Adaptive hypermedia techniques can be used to (partially) solve them.

User navigation, lostness in hyperspace and adaptive navigation support will be the main topics of my talk. Both the cognitive issues and the technological challenges will be dealt with.

Eelco Herder is a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Twente, the Netherlands. He conducts research in the field of intelligent web intermediaries in desktop and mobile contexts. More information can be found at his web site: http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~herder/

For more information please contact Hendri Hondorp or Anton Nijholt

Last modified at $Date: 2003/08/26 09:10:47 $ by Hendri Hondorp