Segmentation Stability: a Key Component for Joint Attention

It is now well established that joint attention is a key capability for socially interacting robots (Brooks et al., 1999, Kaplan and Hafner, 2004, Scassellati, 1999, Itti, 2003). It is also a key component for epigenetic robotic applications in general. This subject has been widely discussed and we present here one specific technical improvement for joint attention which relies on image segmentation. In the new Talking Robots (Baillie, 2004) experiment that we have started, following a successful reimplementation of the Sony’s Talking Heads (Steels, 1998) experiment o

FONT: Flow-guided One-shot Talking Head Generation with Natural Head Motions

One-shot talking head generation has received growing attention in recent years, with various creative and practical applications. An ideal natural and vivid generated talking head video should contain natural head pose changes. However, it is challenging to map head pose sequences from driving audio since there exists a natural gap between audio-visual modalities. In this work, we propose a Flow-guided One-shot model that achieves NaTural head motions(FONT) over generated talking heads. Specifically, the head pose prediction module is designed to generate head pose sequences from the source face and driving audio. We add the random sampling operation and the structural similarity constraint to model the diversity in the one-to-many mapping between audio-visual modality, thus predicting natural head poses. Then we develop a keypoint predictor that produces unsupervised keypoints from the source face, driving audio and pose sequences to describe the facial structure information. Finally, a flow-guided occlusion-aware generator is employed to produce photo-realistic talking head videos from the estimated keypoints and source face. Extensive experimental results prove that FONT generates talking heads with natural head poses and synchronized mouth shapes, outperforming other compared methods.Comment: Accepted by ICME202

Voices from the uncanny valley: How robots and artificial intelligences talk back to us.

Voice is a powerful tool of agency – for humans and non-humans alike. In this article, we go through the long history of talking heads and statues to publicly displayed robots and fortune-tellers, as well as consumer-oriented products such as the late 19thcentury talking dolls of Thomas Edison. We also analyse the attempts at making speaking machines commercially successful on various occasions. In the end, we investigate how speech producing devices such as the actual digital assistants that operate our current technological systems fit into this historical context. Our focus is on the gender aspects of the artificial, posthuman voice. On the basis of our study, we conclude that the female voice and other feminine characteristics as well as the figures of exoticized and racialized ‘Others’ have been applied to draw attention away from the uncanniness and other negative effects of these artificial humans and the machinic speech they produce. Technical problems associated with the commercialization of technologically produced speech have been considerable, but cultural issues have played an equally important role

Nurseries and emotional well-being. Evaluating an emotionally containing model of professional development

Despite official endorsement of attachment principles in nursery work, these are often not translated into nursery practice. One possible reason for this is that staff training does not sufficiently address the personal implications and anxieties that children's attachments may entail for practitioners. Working from a psychoanalytic perspective on organisational functioning and group learning, this paper describes action research with a group of nursery heads who participated in a professional development programme designed specifically to explore emotional experience in professional work. The positive evaluations of the programme by heads and their staff are described including examples of experiential learning and of increased staff awareness about, and responsiveness to, the emotional experience of children. However, the research also concluded that sustained effectiveness of the model is likely to be dependent on an ongoing culture of attention to the emotional experience of nursery staff within nursery umbrella organisations

Iterated learning and grounding: from holistic to compositional languages

This paper presents a new computational model for studying the origins and evolution of compositional languages grounded through the interaction between agents and their environment. The model is based on previous work on adaptive grounding of lexicons and the iterated learning model. Although the model is still in a developmental phase, the first results show that a compositional language can emerge in which the structure reflects regularities present in the population's environment