Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment : The Processing Issues

This volume brings together the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102 “Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication,” primarily discussed at the PINK SSPnet-COST 2102 International Conference on “Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issues” held in Budapest, Hungary, September 7–10, 2010 (http://berber.tmit.bme.hu/cost2102/). The main focus of the conference was on methods to combine and build up knowledge through verbal and nonverbal signals enacted in an environment and in a context. In previous meetings, COST 2102 focused on the importance of uncovering and exploiting the wealth of information conveyed by multimodal signals. The next steps have been to analyze actions performed in response to multimodal signals and to study how these actions are organized in a realistic and socially believable context. The focus was on processing issues, since the new approach is computationally complex and the amount of data to be treated may be considered algorithmically infeasible. Therefore, data processing for gainingenactive knowledge must account for natural and intuitive approaches, based more on heuristics and experiences rather than on symbols, as well as on the discovery of new processing possibilities that account for new approaches for data analysis, coordination of the data flow through synchronization and temporal organization and optimization of the extracted features