Until recently virtual applications rarely incorporated any deep social, cultural or emotional capabilities exhibited in normal human interaction. In this paper, we present a methodology to develop virtual actors with believable communications skills who may provide a sufficient feeling of immersion to reproduce an efficient simulation of human activities. We focus on the relationship between g...

This paper presents the multimodal corpora that are being collected and annotated in the Nordic NOMCO project. The corpora will be used to study communicative phenomena such as feedback, turn management and sequencing. They already include video material for Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Estonian, and several social activities are represented. The data are being annotated following an annotation...

Theoretical developments in the analysis of organizations have recently turned to an “organizational becoming” perspective, which sees the social world as enacted in the micro-context of communicative interactions among individuals through which meaning is negotiated. According to this view, organizational change is endemic, natural and ongoing; it occurs in every-day interactions as actors eng...

Interaction means to share a communicative space with others. Social interactions are reciprocally-oriented activities among currently present partners. An artificial system can be such a partner for humans. In this study, we investigate the effect of disturbance in humanrobot interaction. Disturbance in communication is an attention shift of a partner caused by an external factor. In human-hum...

In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative ...

We report on a preliminary study which investigated the effect of form vs. meaning focused computer-based type-written activities on spoken communicative skills of learners of German. Both types of activities were realized as written interactions with a computer-based dialogue system and were framed within a “Directions giving” scenario. The linguistic form in focus was the German dative case i...

Despite the many potential benefits to its users, social networking appears to provide a rich setting for criminal activities and other misdeeds. In this paper we consider whether the risks of social networking are unique and novel to this context. Having considered the nature and range of applications to which social networks may be applied, we conclude that there are no exploits or fundamenta...