Research: the Human Media Interaction research group

The interactive systems we create range from wearable devices and smart material interfaces to ambient environments. Example applications include ambient entertainment, interactive playgrounds, mediated social touch, and smart material based visitor guiding systems.

Using computer vision and speech technology, we observe the human conversational participant’s body and head movements, facial expressions, and paralinguistic vocalisations and detect social cues. These are used to model the interaction, and to generate the agent’s appropriate conversational behavior.

We work on mobile, distributed multi-device coaching and multimodal training games, using embodied agents and interactive narrative to provide context-adaptive feedback. Examples of application areas are social awareness training for police or motivational health coaching for rehabilitating people.

We have developed and evaluated BCI-controlled games incorporating custom BCI pipelines, using various types of feedback as well as various mappings of mental tasks to in-game actions. We also look at the impact of brain-computer interfaces on society and ethical and moral issues related to the research, development and exploitation of such neurotechnologies.

We research models for the automatic analysis of data by exploiting the synergy between information retrieval, speech and language processing, and database technology.