Project to Build a Talking Thinking Head

A new 2006-2011 $3.4M grant, From Talking Heads to Thinking Heads: A Research Platform for Human Communication Science has been by awarded to a team of researchers at the University of Western Sydney (Burnham, Stevens, Davis, Kuratate, Kim, Paine, Kitamura), Macquarie University (Dale), Flinders University (Powers), the University of Canberra (Wagner), Carnegie Mellon (Black and Schultz), the Technical University of Denmark (Buchholz and Bothe), and Berlin University of Technology (Möller).

Further details can be found at http://marcs.uws.edu.au/ and a list of the 20 positions available on the project can be found at http://marcs.uws.edu.au/join/index.htm

In the project the goal of improving human-machine interaction will be addressed by a team of computer scientists, engineers, language technologists, cognitive scientists and performance artists working together to establish a new generation Talking Head, a Thinking Head that learns from its interactions with humans.

The performance of successive versions of the Head will be evaluated via MARCS Labs behavioural experiments involving human-Head interactions; and via high-profile installations and exhibitions by the project and UWS College of Arts artist-in-residence, Stelarc. In addition to the usual output in scholarly journals, such installations will facilitate public visibility for the project. 

Outcomes will bear on human-machine communication, telecommunications, e-commerce, and mobile phone technology; personalised aids for disabled users, the hearing impaired, the elderly, and children with learning difficulties, foreign language learning; and will facilitate the development of animation in new media, film, and games. Beyond such ends, the Thinking Head will also serve as a research platform - a tangible focus for integrating and motivating exciting developments in programming, visual graphics, voice synthesis and recognition, dialog systems, and performance art.

The project is funded by a joint Special Initiative on Thinking Systems by the Australian Research Council, and the National Health & Medical Research Council Thinking Systems grant.

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