The Thinking Head Project

From Talking Heads to Thinking Heads: A Research Platform for Human Communication Science






Description

• In Human-Computer Interaction, so called “Talking Heads” are used to improve the quality of the face-to-face communication between human users and computer-based services. As users interpret also visual aspects of speech movements, gaze, and even gestures, good talking heads can provide effortless interaction due to approximating natural human-human communication.
• However, state-of-the-art talking heads do neither display many para- and extra-linguistic information, nor make use of knowledge regarding the user (e.g. their subtle facial expressions), immediate context (e.g. what time it is), or world knowledge.
• In this project, an interdisciplinary team of researchers and performance artists are working to establish a new generation Talking Head, that uses all these information and learns from its interactions with humans, and thus can be called a “Thinking Head [2]”.
  

Cooperation & Funding

• Sebastian Möller is Partner Investigator in the “Thinking Head” project.
• The project is funded by Australian Research Council/National Health & Medical Research Council. It is centred at MARCS Auditory Laboratories [3] at the University of Western Sydney, and Macquarie University, Flinders University, University of Canberra, Carnegie Mellon University, the Technical University of Denmark, and Technische Universität Berlin. The project draws on the expertise, resources and methodological approaches of researchers in HCSNet, the Australian Research Council Network in Human Communication Science.