Alessandro Vinciarelli

Isabella Poggi

Laura Vincze

Francesca D'Errico

This book explores the use of technology to detect, predict and understand social cues, in order to analyze and prevent conflict. Traditional human sciences approaches are enriched with the latest developments in Social Signal Processing aimed at an automatic understanding of conflict and negotiation. Communication—both verbal and non-verbal, within the context of a conflict—is studied with the aim of promoting the use of intelligent machines that automatically measure and understand the escalation of conflict, and are able to manage it, in order to support the negotiation process. Particular attention is paid to the integration of human sciences findings with computational approaches, from the application of correct methodologies for the collection of valid data to the development of computational approaches inspired by research on verbal and multimodal communication. In the words of the trade unionist Pierre Carniti, "We should reevaluate conflict, since without conflict there is no social justice." With this in mind, this volume does not approach conflict simply as an obstacle to be overcome, but as a concept to be fully analyzed. The philosophical, linguistic and psychological aspects of conflict, once understood, can be used to promote conflict management as a means for change and social justice.

Social Research and Machine Intelligence

Conflict and Multimodal Communication

Francesco Camastra

This second edition focuses on audio, image and video data, the three main types of input that machines deal with when interacting with the real world. A set of appendices provides the reader with self-contained introductions to the mathematical background necessary to read the book. Divided into three main parts, From Perception to Computation introduces methodologies aimed at representing the data in forms suitable for computer processing, especially when it comes to audio and images. Whilst the second part, Machine Learning includes an extensive overview of statistical techniques aimed at addressing three main problems, namely classification (automatically assigning a data sample to one of the classes belonging to a predefined set), clustering (automatically grouping data samples according to the similarity of their properties) and sequence analysis (automatically mapping a sequence of observations into a sequence of human-understandable symbols). The third part Applications shows how the abstract problems defined in the second part underlie technologies capable to perform complex tasks such as the recognition of hand gestures or the transcription of handwritten data. Machine Learning for Audio, Image and Video Analysis is suitable for students to acquire a solid background in machine learning as well as for practitioners to deepen their knowledge of the state-of-the-art. All application chapters are based on publicly available data and free software packages, thus allowing readers to replicate the experiments.

Theory and Applications

Machine Learning for Audio, Image and Video Analysis

Nicu Sebe

Albert Ali Salah

Theo Gevers

It was a great pleasure to organize the First International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding (HBU), which took place as a satellite workshop to International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) on August 22, 2010, in Istanbul, Turkey. This workshop arose from the natural marriage of pattern recognitionwiththerapidlyadvancingareaofhumanbehavioranalysis.Ouraim was to gather researchersdealing with the problem of modeling human behavior under its multiple facets (expression of emotions, display of relational attitudes, performance of individual or joint actions, etc.), with particular attention to pattern recognition approaches that involve multiple modalities and those that model actual dynamics of behavior. The contiguity with ICPR, one of the most important events in the p- tern recognition and machine learning communities, is expected to foster cro- pollination with other areas, for example temporal pattern mining or time - ries analysis, which share their important methodological aspects with human behavior understanding. Furthermore, the presence of this workshop at ICPR was meant to attract researchers, in particular PhD students and postd- toral researchers, to work on the questions of human behavior understanding that is likely to play a major role in future technologies (ambient intelligence, human–robot interaction, arti?cial social intelligence, etc.), as witnessed by a number of researche?orts aimed at collecting and annotating large sets of multi sensor data,collected from observingpeople in naturaland often technologically challenging conditions.

First International Workshop, HBU 2010, Istanbul, Turkey, August 22, 2010, Proceedings

Human Behavior Understanding

Francesca D’Errico

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International Workshop on Multimodal Communication in Political Speech: Shaping Minds and Social Actions, held in Rome, Italy, during November 10-12, 2010. The 16 regular papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions and presented with three key-notes. The purpose of the Political Speech workshops is to provide a forum for discussing research areas of persuasive agents and social signal processing. This book covers topics on multimodal aspects of political communication, including persuasion, fallacies, racist discourse, as well as music, autobiographic memories, metonymies, dominant postures, rhetorical strategies, interruptions, intonation, and voice appeal.

International Workshop, Political Speech 2010, Rome, Italy, November 10-12, 2010, Revised Selected Papers

Multimodal Communication in Political Speech Shaping Minds and Social Action

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, HBU 2010, a satellite workshop of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Istanbul, Turkey, on August 22, 2010. The 13 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on analysis of human activities; non-verbal action dynamics; visual action recognition; and social signals.

Anna Esposito

Anton Nijholt

Catherine Pelachaud

Klara Vicsi

This volume brings together the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102 "Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication", primarily discussed at the PINK SSPnet-COST2102 International Conference on Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issues, held in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2010. The 40 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The volume is arranged into two scientific sections. The first section, Multimodal Signals: Analysis, Processing and Computational Issues, deals with conjectural and processing issues of defining models, algorithms, and heuristic strategies for data analysis, coordination of the data flow and optimal encoding of multi-channel verbal and nonverbal features. The second section, Verbal and Nonverbal Social Signals, presents original studies that provide theoretical and practical solutions to the modelling of timing synchronization between linguistic and paralinguistic expressions, actions, body movements, activities in human interaction and on their assistance for an effective human-machine interactions.

COST 2102 International Conference, Budapest, Hungary, September 7-10, 2010, Revised Selected Papers

Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment.The Processing Issues

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann

Maja Pantic

Judee K. Burgoon

This book provides comprehensive, authoritative surveys covering the modeling, automatic detection, analysis, and synthesis of nonverbal social signals.

Alessandro Vinciarelli

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