Informatisches Kolloquium WiSe 2013

Speaker

Dr.-Ing. Kirsten Bergmann
Bielefeld University, CITEC – Center of Excellence in “Cognitive Interaction Technology”

When: Monday,  20.01.2014 – 17:15

Where: Konrad-Zuse-Hörsaal, Informatikum

Topic

Co-speech, Iconic Gestures in Real and Virtual Humans

Abstract

The use of co-speech gestures is a ubiquitous characteristic of human-human communication. Building computational simulation models of this natural, communicative behavior and employing them in virtual humans (a) allows to unravel the underlying cognitive mechanisms in humans, (b) helps to improve human computer interaction towards being intuitive and natural, and (c) helps to develop applications that support humans, e.g., in learning.

In this talk, I will first present work that connects empirical analyses based on a multimodal data corpus with data-based and cognitive computational modeling. I will demonstrate that endowing virtual humans with adequate gestural behavior helps to make them appear warmer and more competent. And I will show that, in vocabulary learning, iconic gestures performed by a virtual human and imitated by human learners help to increase the participants¹ memory scores.

Speaker biography

Dr.-Ing. Kirsten Bergmann is a postdoctoral researcher in the research group “Sociable Agents” at Bielefeld University. She is involved in the CRC 673 “Alignment in Communication” (subproject B1 on “Speech-gesture alignment”) and coordinates the CLARIN-D discipline-specific working group on “Speech and other modalities”. She holds both a diploma degree in Computer Science in 2006 and a Ph.D. degree in 2011 from Bielefeld University. Her research interests include multimodal human communication, data-based and cognitive modeling of human communication skills, and the application of such models in virtual humans to support humans in learning etc. Kirsten Bergmann received best paper awards for her work at AAMAS 2009 and IVA 2013, as well as an award for her dissertation.

Contact person

Prof. Dr. Christopher Habel – WSV