INTERACTOR: Natural Interaction Platform

Interactor is an Interaction Platform based on Natural Interaction (human-like) techniques developped by the Laboratorio de Bases de Datos Avanzadas (Labda) at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. It enables to implement with little effort a corpus-based Task Oriented Interaction Domain for bipartite dialogues. Thus it assumes an application and provides access to it through Natural Interaction.Program: Mejorando el Acceso y la Visibilidad de la Información Multilingüe en Red para la Comunidad de Madrid Acronym: MAVIR Ref: TIC-0267 Coordinator: M. Felisa Verdejo (UNED

Natural Interaction Using Pinch Gloves

Research on heuristics evaluation in recent years has focused on improving effectiveness and efficiency with respect to user testing. The aim of this project is to refine a research agenda for comparing and evaluating the usage of Pinch Gloves with other common virtual reality (VR) devices. For this, Nielsen's heuristics is used mainly for the comparative study and evaluation with the help of experts and evaluators to evaluate and examine the cognitive principles in usability and efficiency. A more significant contribution of this research project is that the framework used for experiments will prove which device has its upper hand that will correspond with the objective of this project

Enhancing Natural Interaction with Circumstantial Knowledge

This work focuses the circumstantial knowledge management for a specific need: the achievement of Natural Interaction (NI). In first place, a cognitive approach to NI is glanced as the framework for such knowledge management. This approach reflects some certain requirements for the whole interaction system, which are met by a multi-agent system implementation. Finally, a Situation Modeling is proposed for a first approach to the interaction circumstances management.The presented work has been developed within the MAVIR project (S-505/TIC/0267) endorsed by the Regional Government of Madrid, and is being extended through the SOPAT project (CIT-410000-2007-12), supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education.Publicad

Human-display interaction technology: Emerging remote interfaces for pervasive display environments

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.We're living in a world where information processing isn't confined to desktop computers - it's being integrated into everyday objects and activities. Pervasive computation is human centered: it permeates our physical world, helping us achieve goals and fulfill our needs with minimum effort by exploiting natural interaction styles. Remote interaction with screen displays requires a sensor-based, multimodal, touchless approach. For example, by processing user hand gestures, this paradigm removes constraints requiring physical contact and permits natural interaction with tangible digital information. Such touchless interaction can be multimodal, exploiting the visual, auditory, and olfactory senses.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia and Amper Sistemas, SA

Facial Emotional Classifier For Natural Interaction

The recognition of emotional information is a key step toward giving computers the ability to interact more naturally and intelligently with people. We present a simple and computationally feasible method to perform automatic emotional classification of facial expressions. We propose the use of a set of characteristic facial points (that are part of the MPEG4 feature points) to extract relevant emotional information (basically five distances, presence of wrinkles in the eyebrow and mouth shape). The method defines and detects the six basic emotions (plus the neutral one) in terms of this information and has been fine-tuned with a database of more than 1500 images. The system has been integrated in a 3D engine for managing virtual characters, allowing the exploration of new forms of natural interaction

Spatially Aware Computing for Natural Interaction

Spatial information refers to the location of an object in a physical or digital world. Besides, it also includes the relative position of an object related to other objects around it. In this dissertation, three systems are designed and developed. All of them apply spatial information in different fields. The ultimate goal is to increase the user friendliness and efficiency in those applications by utilizing spatial information. The first system is a novel Web page data extraction application, which takes advantage of 2D spatial information to discover structured records from a Web page. The extracted information is useful to re-organize the layout of a Web page to fit mobile browsing. The second application utilizes the 3D spatial information of a mobile device within a large paper-based workspace to implement interactive paper that combines the merits of paper documents and mobile devices. This application can overlay digital information on top of a paper document based on the location of a mobile device within a workspace. The third application further integrates 3D space information with sound detection to realize an automatic camera management system. This application automatically controls multiple cameras in a conference room, and creates an engaging video by intelligently switching camera shots among meeting participants based on their activities. Evaluations have been made on all three applications, and the results are promising. In summary, this dissertation comprehensively explores the usage of spatial information in various applications to improve the usability

On the linguistic implications of context-bound adult-infant interactions

This poster presents a study of the linguistic information potentially available in adult speech directed to 3-month-old infants. The repetitive nature of the speech directed to young infants and the ecological context of the adult-infant natural interaction setting are analyzed in the light of the “Ecological theory of language acquisition” proposed by Lacerda et al. (2004, this volume). The analysis of transcripts of adult-infant interaction sessions suggests that enough information to derive general noun associations may be available as a consequence of the particular context of the adult-infant interactions during the early stages of the language acquisition process