One of the more interesting lectures at the
FG2008 conference was a
keynote speech delivered by Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, director of the
MIRALab in Geneva. She talked about
Communicating with a Virtual Human or a Robot that has Emotions, Memory and Personality. She went far beyond the simplistic notion of expressing 'the six basic emotions' and talked about how mood, personality and relationships may affect our facial expressions.
The talk by Magnenat-Thalmann focused on facial expression. (source)
By coincidence I got an invitation to write a paper for another conference, organized by Anton Nijholt and Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann (and others), called the
Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA 2009). It is organized by people from the University of Twente but held in Amsterdam. Call for papers: deadline February 2009.
Nadia also mentioned a researcher at Utrecht University called
Arjan Egges. He got his PhD at the MIRALab and is now working on "the integration of motion capture animation with navigation and object manipulation".
Snapshots of the three signs used in the experiment.
Examples of three manipulations of the sign SAW. We tested about 68 sign manipulations in total. These were run through the automatic recognition algorithms we had been working on and they were rated by human signers. The paper is about how humans and machines can be compared.
