Current projects
The SERA project studies social acceptability of verbally interactive robots and agents, with a view to their applications especially in assistive technologies (companions, virtual butlers). To this aim, the project will undertake a field study in three iterations to collect data of real-life, long-term and open-ended relationships of subjects with robotic devices. Findings from the field study will inform theoretical and methodological research as well as a reference architecture for social engagement.
The CLASSIC project explores computational learning techniques in adaptive systems for spoken conversation. It will facilitate rapid deployment of accurate and robust spoken dialogue systems that can learn from experience. The approach is based on statistical learning methods with a unified treatment of uncertainty across the entire system: speech recognition, spoken language understanding, dialogue management, natural language generation, and speech synthesis.
LIREC aims to establish a multi-faceted theory of artificial long-term companions (including memory, emotions, cognition, communication, learning, etc.), embody this theory in robust and innovative technology and experimentally verify both the theory and technology in real social environments.
SOPRANO ('Service-oriented Programmable Smart Environments for Older Europeans') aims to develop affordable, smart ICT-based assisted living services with interfaces which are easy to use for older people and familiar in their home environment.
The HUMAINE network of excellence is currently making a coordinated effort to come to a shared understanding of the issues involved in emotion-oriented computing, and to propose exemplary research methods in the various areas.
The CALLAS Integrated Project aims to design and to develop a multimodal architecture which will include emotional aspects in order to support applications in the new media business scenario with an 'ambient intelligence' paradigm.
AMI and AMIDA target computer enhanced multi-modal interaction in the context of meetings. The project aims at substantially advancing the state-of-the-art, within important underpinning technologies (such as human-human communication modelling, speech recognition, computer vision, multimedia indexing and retrieval).
COGNIRON focuses on the perceptual, representational, reasoning and learning capabilities of embodied robots in human centred environments. The project aims to develop methods and technologies for the construction of such cognitive robots, able to evolve and grow their capacities in close interaction with humans in an open-ended fashion.
The aim of the SEMAINE project is to build a Sensitive Artificial Listener - a multimodal dialogue system with the social interaction skills needed for a sustained conversation with a human user. The system will emphasise 'soft' communication skills, ie non-verbal, social and emotional perception, interaction and behaviour capabilities.
Past projects
Verbmobil aimed to give Germany a top international position in language technology and its economic application in the next millenium by cooperation and concentration of as many specialists as possible from industry and science. The long-sighted aim was the development of a mobile translation system for the translation of spontaneous speech in face-to-face situations.
Amities proposes to develop, showcase and deploy novel technologies for building empirically induced dialogue processors to support multilingual human-computer interaction and integrate these technologies into systems for Automated Multilingual Interaction with Information and Services.
SIRIDUS ('Specification, Interaction and Reconfiguration in Dialogue Understanding Systems') will contribute to Community economic development through scientific and technological advances in spoken language dialogue systems.
COMIC focuses on new methods of work and e-commerce. The main aim of COMIC is to define generic cognitive models for multimodal interaction and to evaluate these in a number of demonstrators.
The DUMAS project ('Dynamic Universal Mobility for Adaptive Speech Interfaces') develops multi-lingual speech-based applications, focusing on intelligent and ambient interaction management with a special emphasis on naturalness that takes into account the user's personalised needs.
AGILE ('Automatic Generation of Instructions in Languages of Eastern Europe') is a tool which allows a technical author to specify, in a non-linguistic representation, the 'content' of different tasks that can be performed by users of CAD-CAM software.
Memories for Life brings together a diverse range of academics in a bid to understand how memory works and to develop the technologies to enhance it.