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Embodied agents play an increasingly important role in cognitive interaction technology. The two main types of embodied agents are virtual humans inhabiting simulated environments and humanoid robots inhabiting the real world. So far research on embodied communicative agents has mainly explored their potential for practical applications. However, the design of communicative artificial agents can also be of great heuristic value for the scientific study of communication. It allows researchers to isolate, implement, and test essential properties of inter-agent communications in operational models. Modeling communication with robots and virtual humans thus involves the vision of using communica...
This volume is the first to bring together researchers studying a range of different types of emerging sign languages in the Americas, and their relationship to the gestures produced in the surrounding communities of hearing individuals. Contents Acknowledgements Olivier Le Guen, Marie Coppola and Josefina Safar Introduction: How Emerging Sign Languages in the Americas contributes to the study of linguistics and (emerging) sign languages Part I: Emerging sign languages of the Americas. Descriptions and analysis John Haviland Signs, interaction, coordination, and gaze: interactive foundations of “Z”—an emerging (sign) language from Chiapas, Mexico Laura Horton Representational strategie...
In the age of digital music it seems striking that so many of us still want to produce music concretely with our bodies, through the movement of our limbs, lungs and fingers, in contact with those materials and objects which are capable of producing sounds. The huge sales figures of musical instruments in the global market, and the amount of time and effort people of all ages invest in mastering the tools of music, make it clear that playing musical instruments is an important phenomenon in human life. By combining the findings made in music psychology and performative ethnomusicology, Marko Aho shows how playing a musical instrument, and the pleasure musicians get from it, emerges from an intimate dialogue between the personally felt body and the sounding instrument. An introduction to the general aspects of the tactile resources of musical instruments, musical style and the musician is followed by an analysis of the learning process of the regional kantele style of the Perho river valley in Finnish Central Ostrobothnia.
Philosophers say what art is and then scientists and then other scholars study how we are equipped, cognitively and socially, to make art and appreciate it. This time-honoured approach will not work. Recent science reveals that we have poor intuitive access to artistic and aesthetic phenomena. Dominic McIver Lopes argues for a new approach that mandates closer integration, from the start, between aesthetics and the human sciences. In these eleven essays he proposes a methodology especially suited to aesthetics, where problems in philosophy are addressed principally by examining how aesthetic phenomena are understood in the human sciences. Since the human sciences include much of the humanities as well as the social, behavioural, and brain sciences, the methodology promises to integrate arts research across the academy. Aesthetics on the Edge opens with a four essays outlining the methodology and its potential. The following essays put the methodology to work, shedding light on the perceptual and social-pragmatic capacities that are implicated in responding to works of art, especially images, but also music, literature, and conceptual art.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Gesture Workshop, GW'99, held in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, in March 1999. The 16 revised long papers and seven revised short papers were carefully reviewed for inclusion in the book. Also included are four invited papers and the transcription of a round table discussion. The papers are organized in sections on human perception and production of gesture, localization and segmentation, recognition, sign language, gesture synthesis and animation, and multimodality.
The Handbook of Technical Communication brings together a variety of topics which range from the role of technical media in human communication to the linguistic, multimodal enhancement of present-day technologies. It covers the area of computer-mediated text, voice and multimedia communication as well as of technical documentation. In doing so, the handbook takes professional and private communication into account. Special emphasis is put on technical communication by means of web 2.0 technologies and its standardization in system development. In summary, the handbook deals with theoretical issues of technical communication and its practical impact on the development and usage of text and speech technologies.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Smart Graphics, SG 2007, held in Kyoto, Japan in June 2007 jointly with the Visual Computing / Graphics and CAD symposium, which takes place in Osaka, Japan. It covers interaction, lifelike characters and affective computing, knowledge-based graphics generation and interaction, and visualization and graphics algorithms.
The volume explores key convergences between cognitive and discourse approaches to language and language learning, both first and second. The emphasis is on the role of language as it is used in everyday interaction and as it reflects everyday cognition. The contributors share a usage-based perspective on language - whether they are examining grammar or metaphor or interactional dynamics - which situates language as part of a broader range of systems which underlie the organization of social life and human thought. While sharing fundamental assumptions about language, the particulars of the areas of inquiry and emphases of those engaged in discourse analysis versus cognitive linguistics are ...
Communication is not just about the transfer of verbal information. Gestures, facial expressions, intonation and body language are all major sources of information during conversation. This book presents a new perspective on communication, one that will help us to better understand humans, and also to build machines that can communicate.