Another meeting of the Dutch Touch “Association was held in December, kindly sponsored by the 3TU Center Humans and Technology. You can read more about the meeting at the 3TU website.

Together with Samer Al Moubayed, I chaired ICMI’s 2016 Doctoral Consortium with lots of interesting talks.

Our Tasty Bits and Bytes paper one the best paper award at ACE 2016.

Jan Kolkmeier presenting our paper on proxemics and gaze in immersive virtual reality at the IVA 2016 conference.

Today, Alejandro defended his PhD thesis on the Interactive PlayGround with success. One of the opponents was our friend and colleague Mohamed Chetouani from Paris.

A podcast on Emotional Computers – Affective Computing and the Aria Valuspa Project, broadcasted by the NTR in the series “De Kennis van NU”. (In Dutch)

“Computers zien we als kille rekenaars. Maar daar komt snel verandering in. Wetenschappers werken aan algoritmen die computers in staat stellen om emoties bij mensen te herkennen en er ook rekening mee te houden. En dat is onmisbaar als ze met ons moeten samenwerken. Maar hoe ver zijn we inmiddels? En waar gaat het naartoe? Karin van den Boogaert praat erover met Dirk Heylen. Hij is hoogleraar Socially Intelligent Computing aan de Universiteit Twente.

Dirk Heylen is betrokken bij het Aria Valuspa project waarin software menselijke stem nabootst. Kijk op deze site voor voorbeelden. Een ander project is SEMAINE waarin Heylen en collega’s een Sensitive Artificial Listener ontwikkelden. Op YouTube kun je een aantal voorbeelden vinden van gesprekken tussen de virtuele persoonlijkheden van dit programma en mensen.”

As you can read on Gijs Huijsman’s post:

“Every year at HMI we organize the Media Technology course in which students build installations that focus on unusual uses of technology. This year the theme of the course was related to our very own Tasty Bits & Bytes project: Future Foods. We are very happy to announce that we are collaborating with Fooddockin Deventer to exhibit the students’ work. On the 28th of January from 17:00 until 20:00 six student groups will showcase installations that combine technology with food in interesting ways.”

Watch one of the installations here.

The Tactile Sleeve for Social Touch is being developed together with the HvA in the COMMIT/ VIEWW project. At the start of the project there was a newspaper article about it NRC-NEXT (see one of the previous posts). After the article appeared we were approached by a caregiver from Bartimeus with the question to look at the possibilities for this technology for people that are deaf blind. We have been exploring options since then and have worked on some prototypes. Today we presented the work so far at the SamenWijzerDag for caregivers and other professionals in the field. We had a large audience that provided interesting ideas and comments. I hope that we can really make a difference with our investigations on tactile interfaces.

A the ICMI conference in Seattle we presented a demo of NAKAMA, organised a grand challenge on Affective Touch/Gesture recognition and we organised a workshop roadmapping the future of Social Signal Processing. Moreover, Jan Kolkmeier presented his ideas on his research to the DC.

(Post updated with Pictures:)

Nakama at ICMI 2015

Jan at ICMI 2015

We organised an Autumn PhD School on Social Signal Processing, Computational Social Science. We had 50 students participating. Nice speakers (Alessandro Vinciarelli Mohammed Chetouani and Daniel Gatica Perez amongst others.