A computer that uses a Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL) system to perceive a human’s facial expressions and tone of voice will be able to engage with a user and carry on a conversation. In a project known as SERMANE, the SAL will be able to adapt its own performance and pursue different actions, depending on the non-verbal behaviour of the user. Now, the European Commission has awarded the project a grant of €2.75 million.
The project is led by a German centre for Artificial Intelligence, DFKI, in collaboration with the Queen's University Belfast, Imperial College London, the University of Paris 8, the University of Twente in the Netherlands and the Technical University of Munich.
Professor Roddy Cowie, from the School of Psychology, who leads the team at Queen's, said: "A basic feature of human communication is that it is coloured by emotion. When we talk to another person, the words are carried on an undercurrent of signs that show them what attracts us, what bores us and so on.
Communicating with computers
The fact that computers do not currently do this is one of the main reasons why communicating with them is so unlike interacting with a human. It is also one of the reasons we can find them so frustrating."
"SEMAINE and projects like it will change the way people interact with technology. They mean that you will be talking to your computer in 20 years time.”
The European Commission awarded SEMAINE a grant of €2.75 million after it was ranked first out of 143 bids for medium-sized projects in the area of cognitive systems and robotics.
You’ve read it. Now review it.
Date Published: April 22, 2008
More by this source
|
Print
|
Send to a friend
|
Rate & Comment
|
Keep up to date
If you found this item fun or informative, please let others know. Simply send to a friend or recommend it to even more people - on any of the following sites:
Latest Science News | reddit | digg.com | del.icio.us | rollyo | stumbleupon
More on artificial intelligence...
Willem Kolff
It was in 1943, in Nazi-occupied Holland, that Willem "Pim" Kolff, who has died aged 97, put together the first version of what he preferred to call an artificial kidney, but which the world came to know as the kidney dialysis machine. Later, in the US, Kolff pioneered the artificial heart and the membrane oxygenator for bypass surgery. But in 1943 he was a member of the resistance, materials were in short supply and manufacturers were under orders to deal exclusively with the Germans. To make his machine, Kolff used sausage casing made of cellophane (then a new substance), orange juice tins, part of a water pump he obtained from a Ford dealer, and a revolving drum containing fluid to clean deadly impurities from the blood that the kidneys were failing to remove.
The perfect robotic hand
New intelligent software developed to build better robots.
I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer
Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.
