Jens Edlund - projects in which I'm directly or indirectly involved.

This is a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond funded project with starting date in 2013.
The melody of speech, or intonation, plays a crucial role in spoken interaction. By altering the speech melody, speakers can highlight important words and phrases making them prominent and more meaningful. Speakers also make use of changing melodies and rhythms to signal when it is time for the other speakers to talk (turntaking) as well as to give others feedback (such as mm or uhuh). The exact timing of melodies in speech is controlled with considerable precision by the speaker. These movements occur in particular places in relationship to syllables. Body and facial gestures regularly accompany the speech melody and often have the same function as intonation, but until now we have not been able to measure the timing of these gestures with the same precision as intonation. The aim of this research project is to measure with precision the timing relationship between the speech melodies and gestures using a large database of recorded conversations in Swedish. The participants have been recorded using high-quality audio and video and motion capture equipment in a specially designed studio. The results will have implications for our understanding of how speech and gestures are planned and coordinated in the brain, and will also enable better modeling of speech and gestures in such speech applications as robots and avatars.

GetHomeSafe is a European Commision Collaborative Project – STREP aiming to develop a system for safe information access (search, navigation, points of interest) and communication (texting) while driving as well as basic functionalities such as music management, address book, phone management search facilities and even social media update. The project will develop solutions involving multimodal dialogue, where speech, a key modality, will be handled by a hybrid (local and remote) speech recognition module.

Speech that occurs in conversation differs from other types of speech - speech where the speaker is reading, or where there is no conversational partner present. In this project we expand on our previous work on intonation, and investigate how the phrasing and rythm of conversational speech works.

The visionary goal for the researchers behind Prosody in conversation is to create an artificial conversational partner. While this is far beyond the scope of the project, this goal has already revealed gaps in our knowledge concerning human conversations. For example, state-of-the-art speech technology neither sounds like a conversational partner, nor understands fundamental aspects of human conversational behavior.

Asking questions is fundamental to people's need for social contact as well as for information gathering. In this project we ask ourselves what a question really is, and what makes it a question.

The project will develop and verify ways of including interactional phenomena in speech synthesis, resulting in well-described and tested methods for synthesizing these phenomena in such a way that they can be employed to recreate human interactional behaviour.

IURO is a EU-Research programme (STREP) and started on February 1st, 2010. It will be funded for three years with 3.5 million euros. Apart from the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering at TUM the following partners are involved: Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Universität Salzburg and the TUM Spin-off ACCREA Engineering in Poland.