HCSNet Update Newsletter Volume 3 Number 6

Tuesday, 13th February 2007
HCSNet Update
Tuesday 13 February 2007

Participant Spotlight

Fang Chen, National ICT Australia

Research area: Speech Science and Technology - Human-Computer Interaction

My main research interests are in speech processing and multimodal systems, ranging from speech signal processing, natural language dialogue, multimodal interaction systems and human centered interface design for PC-based applications and hand-held devices. I’ve published more than 60 papers and filed 18 patents in Australia, US, Europe, China, Japan, North Korea and Mexico. My current research project is to provide better interface design by monitoring user’s cognitive load through measuring users’ multimodal behavior. Multimodal interfaces expand the communication channel between systems and users allowing users to express themselves more naturally and interact with complex information with more freedom of expression. Our research focuses on extending the accepted benefits of multimodal interaction by using it to detect fluctuations in cognitive load. The primary advantage of this approach is that cognitive load can be determined implicitly by monitoring variations of specific multimodal features during day to day tasks. Such unobtrusive measures may help determine user's cognitive load in real time and adapt information content selection and presentation (multimodal output generation) accordingly, in order to ensure optimal user performance. Assessing a user's cognitive load implicitly through their multimodal behavior requires identifying a number of indices that reliably reflect fluctuations. The feasibility of using multimodal behavior as an index of cognitive load is supported by the results of our current empirical studies.

Contact:
Fang Chen
National ICT Australia
ATP Lab
email: fang.chen@nicta.com.au     www: nicta.com.au/director/research/programs/imagen/people/fang_chen.cfm

News

HCSNet Annual Report

We're now in the process of putting together HCSNet's Annual Report to the ARC covering our activities in the 2006 calendar year. You'll soon receive an email asking you to update specific information in your participant profile. In the interim, if you have any thoughts about the Network that you'd like to share, please don't hesitate to send a brief message to newsletter@hcsnet.edu.au. In particular, if you have something to say about how the network has had a positive impact on your own research, we'd love to hear from you, with the possibility of using your testimonial in the Annual Report.

HCSNet International Visiting Speaker Program

Last month, HCSNet International Visiting Speaker, Martin Volk from Stockholm University presented seminars on Cross-Language Information Retrieval, Parallel Treebanks and Machine Translation at Macquarie University, Queensland University of Technology and the University of Melbourne, and presentation slides are now available at: http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/hcsnetevents/2007/volk. Our thanks to hosts Rolf Schwitter, James Hogan and Tim Baldwin for their assistance with Martin's visit. A reminder that the HCSNet IVSP provides financial support to bring visiting speakers to Australia from overseas. The aim of this program is to encourage international linkages between HCSNet participants and overseas researchers and laboratories. See http://www.hcsnet.edu.au/programs/internationalspeakers for more information.

Research Fellow in User Modelling and Language Technology, University of Melbourne

The appointee will apply techniques from user modelling and language technology to help people navigate information rich, physical environments, focusing on the museum domain. Specifically, the appointee will work at the interface between user modelling and language technology, in developing and implementing collaborative and content-based user modelling techniques, and amalgamative language modelling/content delivery techniques. This position is sponsored by the Australian Research Council (ARC) as a collaborative effort between the User Modelling and Natural Language Group at Monash University, and the Language Technology, Agent Research and Interaction Design Groups at the University of Melbourne. The appointee will divide his/her time between Monash University and the University of Melbourne. More information is available at: http://jobs.unimelb.edu.au/jobDetails.asp?sJobIDs=282801.

Upcoming Submission Deadlines

We list here upcoming submission deadlines that fall in the next month. A more complete list of submission deadlines can be found here. Please note that any enquiries regarding these events should be directed to the event organisers, typically identified on the event's website which you can reach from the link below.

HPSG 2007 14th International Conference on HPSG

Stanford, CA, United States
Due date: 15 Feb 2007
URL: http://hpsg.stanford.edu/HPSG07/

TILR Toward the Operability of Language Resources

California, United States
Due date: 15 Feb 2007
URL: http://linguistlist.org/tilr/

AIRWeb 2007 Third International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web

Banff, Alberta, Canada
Due date: 15 Feb 2007
URL: http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2007/

SMPC 2007 Society for Music Perception and Cognition

Quebec, Canada
Due date: 15 Feb 2007
URL: www.musicperception.org

IV07 11th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION VISUALISATION

ZURICH, Switzerland
Due date: 15 Feb 2007
URL: http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV07/

MTT '07 3rd International Conference on Meaning-Text Theory

Klagenfurt, Austria
Due date: 15 Feb 2007
URL: http://www.mtt.upf.edu/

International Conference on Adjectives

Lille, France
Due date: 15 Feb 2007
URL: http://stl.recherche.univ-lille3.fr

DECALOG The 2007 Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue

Università di Trento, Italy
Due date: 18 Feb 2007
URL: http://cswww.essex.ac.uk/Research/nle/decalog/

The 4th International Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science

Funchal, Madeira, Portugal
Due date: 19 Feb 2007
URL: http://www.iceis.org/workshops/nlpcs/nlpcs2007-cfp.html

CAFIC & IAICS Conference 2007

Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China
Due date: 20 Feb 2007
URL: http://www.trinity.edu/org/ics/Harbin-conference-07.html

MLMI'07 4th Joint Workshop on Machine Learning and Multimodal Interaction

Brno, Czech Republic
Due date: 23 Feb 2007
URL: http://www.mlmi07.org

IMRF 2007 The International Multisensory Research Forum's 8th annual meeting

Sydney, Australia
Due date: 23 Feb 2007
URL: http://www.imrf.info/2007

CAASL-2 Computational Approaches to Arabic Script Languages

Stanford, CA, United States
Due date: 26 Feb 2007
URL: http://www.zoorna.org/CAASL2

CLDC-1 1st Conference on Language, Discourse and Cognition

Taipei, Taiwan
Due date: 28 Feb 2007
URL: http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~gilntu/

CONSTRAINT GRAMMAR WORKSHOP

Tartu, Estonia
Due date: 1 Mar 2007
URL: http://giellatekno.uit.no/cg/ee07/

IDP07 Symposium on Discourse Prosody Interfaces

Geneva, Switzerland
Due date: 1 Mar 2007
URL: http://idp07.unige.ch

TFSG'07 2nd International Workshop on Typed Feature Structure Grammars

Tartu, Estonia
Due date: 1 Mar 2007
URL: http://cst.dk/anders/tfsg/tfsg07.html

MMM6 6th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting

Island of Ithaca, Greece
Due date: 1 Mar 2007
URL: http:// (under preparation)

AVSP 2007 Auditory-Visual Speech Processing

Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands
Due date: 1 Mar 2007
URL: http://foap.uvt.nl/avsp2007

COSIT'07 Ninth International Conference on Spatial Information Theory

Melbourne, Australia
Due date: 2 Mar 2007
URL: http://www.cosit.info

ILINTEC'07 Intelligent Linguistic Technologies

Nevada, United States
Due date: 5 Mar 2007
URL: http://www.ipiran.ru/conference/Ilintec07/

Biolinguistics: Language Evolution and Variation

Venice, Italy
Due date: 6 Mar 2007
URL: http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html

CCCT 2007 The 5th International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies

Florida, United States
Due date: 8 Mar 2007
URL: http://www.info-cyber.org/ccct2007

DiSS'07 Disfluency in Spontaneous Speech International Workshop

Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Due date: 8 Mar 2007
URL: http://www.disfluency.org

Workshop on Language, Games, and Evolution

Dublin, Ireland
Due date: 8 Mar 2007
URL: http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/lili/personen/cebert/LGE/

NDTTG 2007 New Directions in Type-theoretic Grammars

Dublin, Ireland
Due date: 8 Mar 2007
URL: http://let.uvt.nl/general/people/rmuskens/ndttg/

Segments and Tone

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Due date: 10 Mar 2007
URL: http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.html

GALA 2007 Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition 2007

Barcelona, Spain
Due date: 15 Mar 2007
URL: http://www.gala2007.uab.es/

Wikifying Research

Leipzig, Germany
Due date: 15 Mar 2007
URL: http://email.eva.mpg.de/~cysouw/meetings/wikifying.html

The Sixth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context

Roskilde University, Denmark
Due date: 15 Mar 2007
URL: http://context-07.ruc.dk/

Upcoming Conferences

We list here upcoming conferences and workshops that fall in the next month. A more complete list of events can be found here. Please note that any enquiries regarding these events should be directed to the event organisers, typically identified on the event's website which you can reach from the link below.

9th International Columbia School Conference on the Interaction of Linguistic Form and Meaning with Human Behavior

Date: 18 Feb 2007
to 19 Feb 2007 URL: http://www.csling.org/

CICLing-2007 8th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics

Mexico City, Mexico
Date: 18 Feb 2007
to 24 Feb 2007 URL: www.CICLing.org/2007

BI Biolinguistic Investigations

Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Date: 23 Feb 2007
to 25 Feb 2007 URL: http://www.biolinguistics.net

Standard Prosody or Prosody of Linguistic Standards? Prosodic Variation and Grammar Writing

Siegen, Germany
Date: 28 Feb 2007
to 2 Mar 2007 URL: http://www.let.ru.nl/gep/jp/dgfs2007/main.html

Evolution workshop, DGfS The Role of Variation in Language Evolution

Siegen, Germany
Date: 28 Feb 2007
to 2 Mar 2007 URL: http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/gjaeger/dgfs2007/cfp.html

Anaphoric Demonstratives DGfS Workshop: Anaphoric Uses of Demonstrative Expressions

Siegen, Germany
Date: 28 Feb 2007
to 2 Mar 2007 URL: http://www.cogsci.uos.de/demonstratives

Workshop on Polysemy and Conceptual Representation

Siegen, Germany
Date: 28 Feb 2007
to 2 Mar 2007 URL: http://www3.uni-siegen.de/fb3/dgfs2007/

Composing in the XXIst century: processes and philosophies

University of Montreal, Canada
Date: 28 Feb 2007
to 3 Mar 2007 URL: www.oicm.umontreal.ca

30th International Conference on Intelligent Audio Environments

Saariselkä, Finland
Date: 15 Mar 2007
to 17 Mar 2007 URL: http://www.aes.fi/aes30/
HCSNet Update is a weekly electronic publication of HCSNet, the ARC Research Network in Human Communication Science, and is emailed to all Network participants. If you have received this newsletter by some other means, or you'd like to find out more about HCSNet, visit our website at www.hcsnet.edu.au. For enquiries about this newsletter or to stop receiving it, please email newsletter@hcsnet.edu.au.