MARCS to Lead Project to Build a Talking Thinking Head

03 August 2006

MARCS Auditory Laboratories at the University of Western Sydney is the recipient of a new $3.4M grant entitled From Talking Heads to Thinking Heads: A Research Platform for Human Communication Science. The project is funded by a joint ARC/NH&MRC Thinking Systems Special Initiative grant to UWS Chief Investigator, Prof Denis Burnham, Director of MARCS Auditory Laboratories for the 5-year period 2006-2011. The grant research team consists of researchers at UWS (Burnham, Stevens, Davis, Kuratate, Kim, Paine, and Kitamura), Macquarie (Dale), Flinders (Powers), University of Canberra (Wagner), Carnegie Mellon (Black and Schultz), the Technical University of Denmark (Buchholz and Bothe), and Berlin University of Technology (Möller).

Talking Heads or "Agents" emulate elements of face-to-face conversation through speech, gaze, and gesture, and are used in applications such as information kiosks for tourists, ticket booking, foreign language instruction, companions for the elderly or disabled, telecommunications, computer interfaces, and so forth. However, current human-talking head interactions lack the vital spark and subtle nuance that is essential to human-human interaction.

In this 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 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, MARCS labs, the College of Arts, and UWS.