Towards Social Computers
Fuelled by the sheer volumes of data and computing power, the rapidly progressing developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning led to recognition algorithms with unprecedented performances. Current image recognition performances are nearing a level approaching that of human performance. On some specialised domains, computers even outperform humans in image recognition abilities. The impressive developments enable a next step in the integration of computers and computing devices in our everyday world. In order to achieve a seamless integration of computers in our daily life, computers should be able to communicate in a human-like manner. The long-standing challenge to achieve human-level verbal communication, i.e., speech recognition and speech production, obscured the importance of its non-verbal counterpart. Non-verbal communication is crucial to the social interactions between humans. Examples of nonverbal expressions are vocal expression, such as vocal pitch or intensity, and facial expressions such as smiling or frowning. Nonverbal expressions provide indispensable contextual cues to social interactions. Our research focusses on the understanding, modelling and simulation of the interactive nonverbal dynamics of communicating humans, with the aim to develop computers, robots or intelligent agents with social capabilities. We formalise the nonverbal interactions between human-human or human-computer dyads in terms of dynamical systems theory. In this formalisation, dyadic nonverbal communication gives rise to an attractor manifold representing the complex expression dynamics of both interlocutors. This allows us to study and simulate the causal interactions between communicating faces and voices by means of the powerful tools offert by dynamical systems theory. The result is a characterisation of the dynamical building blocks of nonverbal communication. In the presentation the results obtained will be demonstrated and their contribution to the development of social computers will be explained by means of illustrative examples.
Date and Time
Location
Hosts
Registration
- Date: 04 Apr 2017
- Time: 06:15 AM UTC to 07:05 AM UTC
-
Add Event to Calendar
- Sharjah, United Arab Emirates
- United Arab Emirates
- Building: American University of Sharjah
- Room Number: Hall A - Main Building
- Contact Event Host
-
members should send their name, email, and affiliation to Ms. Salwa so she can arrange for their access to the campus and do not ask them to pay for the conference fees as they will only attend the keynote.
- Co-sponsored by Ms. Salwa
Speakers
Professor Eric Postma of Tilburg University
Biography:
Eric Postma is a professor in Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University, The Netherlands and at the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS) in 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. His main research interest is in computational models of vision and in the analysis of vocal and facial social signals. In addition, he works on a wide variety of data science problems involving signal and image processing. His seminal work on the automatic recognition of paintings ("artist attribution") initiated in collaboration with the Van Gogh museum in The Netherlands gave rise to an international joint effort to develop digital methods to the analysis of art works. His work has been often covered in the international media. Professor Postma has published papers in international scientific journals ranging from cognitive science to artificial intelligence. He was Editor-in-Chief of special issues of the journals Pattern Recognition Letters and Signal Processing. In most of his work, the combination of (mainly visual) sensing and machine learning plays an important role. He supervised over 20 PhD students on topics such as intelligent agents, image recognition, painting analysis, social signal processing, manifold learning, and deep learning. Professor Postma is a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities, leads the Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence group at Tilburg University, and is a member of the scientific core group of the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science in 's-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands.