Anna Esposito

ACOUSTICAL AND PERCEPTUAL STUDY OF GEMINATION IN ITALIAN STOPS

On the basis of theoretical considerations and results from acoustic and perceptual analyses, it is hypothesized that closure duration is the primary cue for gemination in Italian. Results of an acoustic analysis of a large number of single and geminate Italian utterances show two acoustic correlates of gemination: the length of the closure and the length of the vowel preceding the consonant. Other acoustic parameters were not systematically related to gemination. These results were validated perceptually. At the perceptual level, the above cues were used by the listeners in the geminate/nongeminate discrimination; however, closure duration played a major role. Moreover, it was found that the significant lengthening of consonant was only partially compensated by the shortening of the previous vowel and by a small lengthening of the geminate utterance with respect to the nongeminate one. This result suggests that speakers follow a sort of timing (rhythm) which is fixed in duration and depends on the number of syllables in the word: words with equal numbers of syllables do not change in utterance length, an elongated segment being partly compensated by the shortening of another. This process seems to be applied also perceptually suggesting that the timing (rhythm) of a language is also an auditory attitude.

Approximation of continuous and discontinuous mappings by a growing neural RBF-based algorithm

In this paper a neural network for approximating continuous and discontinuous mappings is described. The activation functions of the hidden nodes are the Radial Basis Functions (RBF) whose variances are learnt by means of an evolutionary optimization strategy. A new incremental learning strategy is used in order to improve the net performances. The learning strategy is able to save computational time because of the selective growing of the net structure and the capability of the learning algorithm to keep the effects of the activation functions local. Further, it does not require high order derivatives. An analysis of the learning capabilities and a comparison of the net performances with other approaches reported in literature have been performed. It is shown that the resulting network improves the approximation results reported for continuous mappings and for those exhibiting a finite number of discontinuities.

Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Behaviours

COST 2102: Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication (CAVeNC).- I - Verbal and Noverbal Coding Schema.- Annotation Schemes for Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication: Some General Issues.- Presenting in Style by Virtual Humans.- Analysis of Nonverbal Involvement in Dyadic Interactions.- II - Emotional Expressions.- Childrens Perception of Musical Emotional Expressions.- Emotional Style Conversion in the TTS System with Cepstral Description.- Meaningful Parameters in Emotion Characterisation.- III - Gestural Expressions.- Prosodic and Gestural Expression of Interactional Agreement.- Gesture, Prosody and Lexicon in Task-Oriented Dialogues: Multimedia Corpus Recording and Labelling.- Egyptian Grunts and Transportation Gestures.- IV - Analysis and Algorithms for Verbal and Nonverbal Speech.- On the Use of NonVerbal Speech Sounds in Human Communication.- Speech Spectrum Envelope Modeling.- Using Prosody in Fixed Stress Languages for Improvement of Speech Recognition.- Single-Channel Noise Suppression by Wavelets in Spectral Domain.- Voice Source Change During Fundamental Frequency Variation.- A Gesture-Based Concept for Speech Movement Control in Articulatory Speech Synthesis.- A Novel Psychoacoustically Motivated Multichannel Speech Enhancement System.- Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Acoustic Signals with the Dresden UASR System.- V - Machine Multimodal Interaction.- VideoTRAN: A Translation Framework for Audiovisual Face-to-Face Conversations.- Spoken and Multimodal Communication Systems in Mobile Settings.- Multilingual Augmentative Alternative Communication System.- Analysis and Synthesis of Multimodal Verbal and Non-verbal Interaction for Animated Interface Agents.- Generating Nonverbal Signals for a Sensitive Artificial Listener.- Low-Complexity Algorithms for Biometric Recognition.- Towards to Mobile Multimodal Telecommunications Systems and Services.- Embodied Conversational Agents in Wizard-of-Oz and Multimodal Interaction Applications.- Telling Stories with a Synthetic Character: Understanding Inter-modalities Relations.

Biometric Applications Related to Human Beings: There Is Life beyond Security

The use of biometrics has been successfully applied to security applications for some time. However, the extension of other potential applications with the use of biometric information is a very recent development. This paper summarizes the field of biometrics and investigates the potential of utilizing biometrics beyond the presently limited field of security applications. There are some synergies that can be established within security-related applications. These can also be relevant in other fields such as health and ambient intelligence. This paper describes these synergies. Overall, this paper highlights some interesting and exciting research areas as well as possible synergies between different applications using biometric information.

Needs and challenges in human computer interaction for processing social emotional information

Emotional expressions.Multimodal communication.Needs and challenges in emotionally and believable ICT interfaces. Demand for and delivery so far of sophisticated computational instruments able to recognize, process and store relevant interactional signals, as well as interact with people, displaying suitable autonomous reactions appropriately sensitive to environmental changes, have produced great expectations in Information Communication Technology (ICT). Knowing what an appropriate continuation of an interaction is depends on detecting the addressers register and a machine interface unable to assess differences will have difficulty managing interactions. Progress toward understanding and modeling such facets is crucial for implementing behaving Human Computer Interaction (HCI) systems that will simplify user access to future, profitable, remote and nearby social services. This paper raises new research questions via new means for socio?behavioral and emotional investigations, and suggests the gathering of new experimental data and theories across a spectrum of research concepts, in order to develop new psychological and computational approaches crucial for implementing believable and trustable HCI systems which exploit synthetic agents, robots, and sophisticated humanlike interfaces.

Introduction to the Special Issue “Beyond Industrial Robotics: Social Robots Entering Public and Domestic Spheres”

Industrial and domestic robotics provide fascinating and relevant perspective insights into current and possible trajectories for the development of contemporary societies. While industrial robotics has found its place since the 1960s, domestic robotics wherein humans interact with social robots is still an unsettled area. After reviewing data on the diffusion of social robots and on their use, the historical tradition from which social robots come is discussed. This discussion is followed by an analysis of the penetration of social robots in everyday life and the importance of interdisciplinary research is highlighted.

Children's perception of musical emotional expressions

This study investigates on childrens ability to interpret emotions in instrumentally-presented melodies. 40 children (20 males and 20 females) all aged six years, have been tested for the comprehension of emotional concepts through the correct matching of emotional pictures to pieces of music. Results indicate that 6-year-old emotional responses to orchestral extracts considered full of affective cues are similar to those demonstrated by adults and that there is no gender effect.

Neuronal symphonies: Musical improvisation and the centrencephalic space of functional integration

Musical improvisation is a sophisticated activity in which a performer realizes, real-time, melodic, and rhythmic sequences in harmony with those from other musicians. The study of musical improvisation helps one to understand not only the cognition of creativity, but also the complex neuronal basis of executive functions, the relation between conscious and unconscious action, and even more. So far, the prevailing models, founded on the brain imaging method, have focused on the connection between the cortical areas and their cognitive processes. Little attention, on the other hand, has been given to the huge variety of subcortical activities, especially in the basal ganglia. This fundamental subcortical component, through its implicit procedures and the role it plays in memory, is responsible to produce new information all the time, allowing the prefrontal cortex to transform a huge and disordered amount of data in explicit creative acts. The basal ganglia are strongly related to the activation of chemical signals generated by dissonance or lack of symmetry between perception and expectation, participating even in the responses to environmental demands according to the circumstances. Thus, they interact with the frontal cortex and with the limbic system, playing a key role in planning and selecting appropriate actions and in decision making. In this text, we try to explain in which sense improvisation is connected to the processes of executive functions, to creativity and to the integrated activity of cortical–subcortical areas controlling the free flow of ideas and to expressive spontaneity. Eventually, we purpose a model according to which structure (improvisational field) and process (improvisational time) take part at the centrencephalic space of functional integration, which, through both competing and cooperating dynamics, gives way to spontaneous composition.

A New Incremental Strategy for Function Approximation by Radial Basis Function Neural Networks

In this paper we present a new incremental learning algorithm for approximating continuous mapping. The algorithm uses radial basis functions as activation functions. The novelty of the algorithm has different aspects: First, the learning procedure is accomplished modifying only the variances of the activation functions instead of the weights on the synapses; Secondly, the variances of the radial basis functions are trained by a two stage strategy, which includes a local optimization of each new neuron variance. An evolutionary optimization algorithm instead of the usual backpropagation algorithm is used to train the variances. The ability of the net to save training time depends on selectively growing the net structure and on the capability of the algorithm to preserve the locality of the activation functions.

The Emergence of Creativity

Creativity is one of the central dimensions of human achievement and social development and has always fascinated scientists and non-scientists alike. But what is the essential nature of creativity? And what is the role of consciousness in the emergence of creativity? If it is true that it has been explored in many aspects in the cognitive and neurobiological field, it is also true that the lore chest—from which the conscious mind through unconscious mechanisms extracts the rough material that is then brought to the surface—has been less investigated. The purpose of this article is to give an account of how the multiplicity of levels of awareness is made possible by a spontaneous order that has nothing to do with a monolithic view of creativity.