Titel: Interaction Analysis of Television Commercials Instituut: University of Twente (HMI) Plaats: Enschede Land: Nederland Begindatum: nog niet vastgesteld Voltooid: Nee Begeleider: Rieks op den Akker Onderwerpen:

Beschrijving:

TV advertisements are usually considered as one-sided communication processes, where context and meaning is presumed to be delivered by the advertiser. Viewers, however, take ultimately part in interpreting and constructing meaning, a process mediated by the construction of a (virtual) social reality in which the viewer is cast into a specific role. The first TV ads had a simple interaction format: pictures - or a short video - of the product is shown and a voice over of an invisible producer speaks directly to the viewer, trying to convince him of the special qualities of the product. This classical format casts the viewer in the role of the potential buyer or client, who is directly addressed by the producer. In ``slice-of-life'' ads stereotypical situations are portrayed in which an individual experiences a problem and finds a solution, which is then linked to the product. It is important then that the viewer can identify himself with the character that experiences the problem. Involvement and identification are of primary importance for the effectiveness of tv commercials. This research project is about the various ways of framing used in tv ads to cast the viewer in a specific role or relation with the characters in the role play. A few different relations between the ads and the viewer are: addressing the viewer as the audience ``out there'', inviting the conscious identification with the characters, empathy with a character, simple entertained by what happens between the characters in the story. But there are other framings. In ``post-modern advertisements we see a rich variety in the use of visual, audible and other elements to attract the attention of the viewer and to cast him in a specific role. Observable elements are language style, narrative structures, cinematographic views, choice of characters, ways of addressing and/or footing during the commercial, facial expressions, as well as the use of humor. Various literary works in the area of television, movie and discourse analysis will be consulted to obtain a view about how these elements are used in the creation of television commercials. A corpus of tv ads will be assembled and they will be classified according a classification scheme of typical interaction styles and viewer roles, to be developed in the project. Ads will be further annotated with a number of the above mentioned elements. Finally, methods for automatic detection of elements and styles are investigated in order to automatically classify tv ads in the defined interaction categories. Capita Selectaopdracht Titel: Pointing Gestures and Referring Expressions For a Virtual Guide Instituut: University of Twente (HMI) Plaats: Enschede Land: Nederland Begindatum: 12-09-2006 Voltooid: Ja Verslag: http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/verslagen/capita-selecta/CS-Zweers-Mike.pdf Begeleider: Mariët Theune Onderwerpen: Multimodal Interactions, Speech and Language Technology Beschrijving: This research project investigates the possibility of using the model for generating combined linguistic and gestural references to an object proposed by van der Sluis in a Virtual Guide agent for generating pointing gestures [Slu05]. Additionally some other algorithms concerning generation of referring expressions will be discussed and their features and functionality compared. [Slu05] Van der Sluis, I. (2005), Multimodal Reference, Studies in Automatic Generation of Multimodal Referring Expressions. Ph.D. thesis, Tilburg University, the Netherlands.