Methodological considerations concerning manual annotation of musical audio in function of algorithm development

In research on musical audio-mining, annotated music databases are needed which allow the development of computational tools that extract from the musical audiostream the kind of high-level content that users can deal with in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) contexts. The notion of musical content, and therefore the notion of annotation, is ill-defined, however, both in the syntactic and semantic sense. As a consequence, annotation has been approached from a variety of perspectives (but mainly linguistic-symbolic oriented), and a general methodology is lacking. This paper is a step towards the definition of a general framework for manual annotation of musical audio in function of a computational approach to musical audio-mining that is based on algorithms that learn from annotated data. 1

Real Time Animation of Virtual Humans: A Trade-off Between Naturalness and Control

Virtual humans are employed in many interactive applications using 3D virtual environments, including (serious) games. The motion of such virtual humans should look realistic (or ‘natural’) and allow interaction with the surroundings and other (virtual) humans. Current animation techniques differ in the trade-off they offer between motion naturalness and the control that can be exerted over the motion. We show mechanisms to parametrize, combine (on different body parts) and concatenate motions generated by different animation techniques. We discuss several aspects of motion naturalness and show how it can be evaluated. We conclude by showing the promise of combinations of different animation paradigms to enhance both naturalness and control

Multi-Level Representation of Gesture as Command for Human Computer Interaction

oai:ojs.cai.ui.sav.sk:article/16The paper addresses the multiple forms of representation that human gesture takes at different levels for human computer interaction, ranging from gesture acquisition to mathematical model for analysis, pattern for recognition, record for database up to end-level application event triggers. A mathematical model for gesture as command is presented. We equally identify and provide particular models for four different types of gestures by considering both posture information and underlying motion trajectories. The problem of constructing gesture dictionaries is further addressed by taking into account similarity measures and dictionary discriminative features

Tangible interaction as an aid for object navigation in 3D modeling

This study introduced an interaction technique that used tangible interaction for 3D modeling. A hybrid interaction technique using a Kinect camera and a smartphone with a gyroscope was developed for the navigating objects in a 3D modeling software. It was then tested on 20 participants categorized as amateurs who had basic 3D/ CAD modeling experience and 20 participants categorized as the experts who had extensive experience working with the modeling software. This research study presents the need for existence of such interaction technique, gaps from the related previous studies, statistical findings from the current study and possible reasons for the results. The results concluded that the even though the hybrid interaction technique was efficient for both the participant categories and though there existed a statistical significance in efficiency for the amateur category, it did not provide a better user experience for the expert category and user experience for the amateur category was inconclusive. The study suggests that future studies and fine tuning of the current study could have a positive effect on the beginners in 3D modeling without causing a major impact for the experts

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications