Doctoral Thesis
For my doctoral thesis, I examined different factors that influence the turn-taking in dialogue, and how these mechanisms can be applied to artificial characters.
The focus was on behavior patterns that express the personality and the interpersonal stance toward the interlocutor.
Drink-O-Mender
This demonstrator of a health advisor was created by Hannes Ritschel, Andreas Seiderer and myself for a public event showcasing local research.
Later, I supervised a group of students who presented this demonstrator to the inhabitants of several elderly homes in order to ground the following discussion about potential applications and requirements for this target group.
RoboGames
For this project I supervised two students who programmed an emotional game-playing companion. For this purpose, two different personalities were modeled - a friendly partner and a hostile rival - which react differently to game events and express this verbally as well as using facial expressions.
This application was used in the context of the ForGenderCare project in order to examine how elderly people interact with social robots.
Empathy Simulation
One of the simplest empathy mechanisms is the mirroring of observed emotions.
In this project I worked on the facial expression generation of the robot we used, and created rules for the timing and selection of emotional comments.
RobotPuzzle
This project primarily dealt with the disambiguation in human-robot cooperation by combining gaze direction and speech.
My work on this included creating the dialogue logic and researching the timing of the gaze behavior.
Master's Thesis
Speech and Gesture Input for Different Interaction Tasks in a Virtual World
In my Master's thesis I researched how to interact with a virtual world using speech and full-body gestures. For this I looked at four different action categories: navigation, selection, object manipulation and dialogue with NPCs. The user study revealed that different input modalities are preferred for each of these tasks.
Bachelor's Thesis
Gaze Behavior Variations and Facial Expression Generation for Embodied Conversational Agents
Based on my work as a student assistant, I calculated rules for generating facial expressions and gaze direction of a virtual agent based on its current affective state. For this I mapped the dimensions "Pleasure" and "Dominance" of Mehrabian's PAD temperament model to both the Facial Action Coding System and the directions of gaze aversion.
Spectators, a joy to watch
Created during my time as a student assistant. Together with Ionut Damian and Dominik Sollfrank I programmed virtual tennis spectators which react emotionally to events in the match.
My task in that group was to create the various emotional expressions and to write the rules which select the appropriate animation at run time.
With this application, we won the GALA audience award at the IVA 2009 conference.