15 Jun 2022
Today we celebrated the publication of the e-book:
“Die Mottersproch in der Vielfalt des Deutschen / A língua materna na diversidade do alemão”
edited by Cléo V. Altenhofen, Lucas Löff Machado, Claudia Wolff Pavan, and Willian Radünz
(Editora Fundação Fénix, 366 p., ISBN: 978-65-81110-78-9, DOI: 10.36592/9786581110789)
In this book, scholars and researchers from Brazil and Germany address questions on the diversity of the German regional and immigration languages in a collection of 32 texts in a bilingual version in German (and varieties) plus Portuguese.
The book is an irrefusable invitation to reflect on the role of the mother tongue in education and science, and an invaluable contribution to the visibility of issues that permeate the various situations of social life.
I had the pleasure of contributing a text discussing a song in Hohenlohisch (a German variety spoken primarily in the northeastern part of Baden-Württemberg) set to music by my grandfather Julius Gessinger.
The e-book can be downloaded from the website of the Center of German and European studies (Porto Alegre/Brazil).
The live presentation of the book was recorded and can be viewed again here:
02 Jun 2022
The aim of the LT-Bridge H2020 Project is to integrate Malta into European research and innovation efforts for AI-based language technologies.
At the LT-Bridge summer school in Galway, representatives of the University of Malta, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), and various Dublin universities (DCU, TCD, UCD, TUD) came together to learn about topics like personalisation (Prof Owen Conlan, TCD), dialogue systems and chatbots (Dr Emer Gilmartin, TCD), neural machine translation (Prof Mikel L. Forcada, University of Alicante/Spain), coreference resolution (Dr Yufang Hou, IBM Research and TU Darmstadt/Germany), distributional semantics (Filip Klubicka, TUD), and Irish NLP tasks (Prof Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis University/USA).
The summer school also featured a special session on research career development for early stage researchers, a poster session, and ample opportunity to network.
LT-Bridge summer school at NUI Galway
04 May 2022
I am currently remotely attending my first CHI conference, which is taking place in New Orleans (USA), and I am enjoying the experience! 🤩
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
CHI – pronounced 'kai' – annually brings together researchers and practitioners from all over the world and from diverse cultures, backgrounds,
and positionalities, who have as an overarching goal to make the world a better place with interactive digital technologies.
01 Apr 2022
I am happy to share that I am starting a new position as postdoctoral researcher
with Assoc. Prof. Ben Cowan
in the HCI@UCD group at the School of Information and Communication Studies
of University College Dublin.
The position is affiliated with the ADAPT Centre.
ADAPT’s research vision is to pioneer new forms of proactive, scalable, and integrated AI-driven Digital Media Technology
that empower individuals and society to engage in digital experiences with control, inclusion, and accountability
with the long-term goal of a balanced digital society.
23 Feb 2022
The proceedings of our conference about human perspectives on spoken human-machine interaction (HMI) are now available
online.
📖 #openaccess 🔓
The papers presented at SpoHuMa21 explore spoken HMI from various angles.
The contributions by Ibrahim & Skantze and Sinha & Siegert examine how human speech in HMI changes depending
on the addressee and what challenges are involved in understanding its variability. Allen and Leisten
& Rieser investigate another aspect of human speech, namely gender-based perception and behavior
differences, and how these may influence the attitude towards speaking devices. Various medical applications
that leverage spoken HMI are presented by Collins, Bevacqua, De Loor, & Querrec, Attas, Kellett,
Blackmore, & Christensen, and Pevy, Christensen, Walker, & Reuber. These include seizure
narration, emotion dimensions of speakers with anxiety disorders, and virtual medical assistance. Finally,
Honkalammi, Veivo, & Johansson and Chen, Liesenfeld, Li, & Yao deal with cooperative
aspects of spoken HMI, such as advice giving in learning processes and the effect of computer disfluency on
memory recall.
Many thanks to the authors for their contributions and, of course, to FRIAS (Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies) for having us!