Talking Photographs

Photographs

D-Theory: Talking about Talking about Trees

Linguists, including computational linguists, have always been fond of talking about trees. In this paper, we outline a theory of linguistic structure which talks about talking about trees; we call this theory Description theory (D-theory). While important issues must be resolved before a complete picture of D-theory emerges (and also before we can build programs which utilize it), we believe t...

Negative emotional photographs are identified more slowly than positive photographs.

In three experiments, we investigated whether the emotional valence of a photograph influenced the amount of time required to initially identify the contents of the image. In Experiment 1, participants saw a slideshow consisting of positive, neutral, and negative photographs that were balanced for arousal. During the slideshow, presentation time was substantially limited (60 ms), and the images...

Talking Faces

We present a method to generate mouth animations coupled with moderate movements of the head. Our method uses a coarse 2D textured mesh representation of images. With hardware texture mapping, we obtain 30 frames/sec animations on modest PC platforms. The synthesized animation sequence is realistic and lively. Radial basis functions are used in the underlying animation engine. At each phoneme t...

Talking Robots

In the last years robotic platforms have appeared in many research and everyday life contexts. An easy way of interacting with them has then become a necessity. Human Robot Interaction is the research field that aims at studying how robots can interact with humans in the most natural way. In this work we will present preliminary studies that we have been done in this direction, focusing on Natu...