Abstract

ILHAIRE objectives are to help the scientific and industrial community to bridge the gap between knowledge on human laughter and its use by avatars, thus enabling sociable conversational agents to be designed, using natural-looking and natural-sounding laughter.

Description

ILHAIRE (Incorporating Laughter into Human Avatar Interactions: Research and Experiments) is a European project (FP7) that started in 2011.

Within the project we will gather data on laughter using high quality sound, video, facial and upper body motion capture. The process of database collection will be grounded in psychological foundations and the data will be used to validate computational and theoretical models of analysis and synthesis of audio-visual laughter. Dialog systems between humans and avatars will be developed and we will conduct studies to capture the qualitative experience evoked by a laughing avatar.

Workpackages:

Workpackage 1: Incremental Database
... provides the resources required for most of the other work packages by assembling existing resources and generating new ones to create an incremental database.

Workpackage 2: Multimodal Analysis and Recognition of Laughter
... concerns multimodal analysis and modelling of laughter. This covers both hilarious and conversational (social) laughter.

Workpackage 3: Multimodal Generation and Synthesis of Laughter
... deals with the development of models for generation and synthesis of audiovisual laughter.

Workpackage 4: Laughter-enabled Dialog Modelling
... designs an adaptive and data-driven multimodal dialogue management system for achieving natural and user-friendly interactions integrating laughter.

Workpackage 5: Psychological Foundations of Laughter
... will lay the psychological foundations of laughter.

Workpackage 6: Integration and Evaluations
... has two main tasks, one related to the integration of the various technologies developed within ILHAIRE, and one regarding the evaluation of the integrated system and of its components.

Workpackage 7: Dissemination and Exploitation
... includes the creation of this web site for the dissemination of project results.

Partners:

University of Mons (UMONS), Belgium

LTCI (Laboratoire de Traitement et Communication de l'Information), a joint laboratory between CNRS and TELECOM ParisTech (UMR 5141), France

Laboratory for Human-Centered Multimedia (HCM) in Augsburg, Germany

Università degli Studi of Genova, Italy

University College London, United Kingdom

Queen's University Belfast, Belfast

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Supelec's IMS research group located in Metz, France

Cantoche, France