In 2008 the Olympics Games will be held in Beijing. For this purpose the city government of Beijing has launched the Special Programme for Construction of Digital Olympics. One of the objectives of the program is the use of artificial intelligence technology to overcome language barriers during the games. In order to demonstrate the contribution that speech-to-speech translation technology (SST...

Machine-based emotional intelligence is a requirement for more natural interaction between humans and computer interfaces and a basic level of accurate emotion perception is needed for computer systems to respond adequately to human emotion. Humans convey emotional information both intentionally and unintentionally via speech patterns. These vocal patterns are perceived and understood by listen...

The Gatekeeper is a vision-based door security system developed at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Faces are detected in a real-time video stream using an efficient algorithmic approach, and are recognized using principal component analysis with class specific linear projection. The system sends commands to an automatic sliding door, speech synthesizer, and touchscreen through a mul...

In this paper, an emotion classification system based on speech signals is presented. The classifier can identify the most common emotions, namely anger, neutral, happiness and fear. The algorithm computes a number of acoustic features which are fed into the classifier based on a pattern recognition approach. The classification system is of potential benefit for ambient intelligence in which th...

Reliable confidence measures are essential to the basis of decisionmaking for enriching human-machine speech interaction with necessary intelligence in ergonomic dialog management. In addition to a survey of the state of the art in confidence measurement, this work also provides classification of methods derivated from several points of view and describes possible fields of application. The the...

This special issue of the Journal is devoted to the work of twelve eminent speech scientists who apply novel soft computing methods to address some of the most difficult and persistent problems facing speech recognition systems today. I first heard these scientists discuss their innovative soft computing algorithms at the University of Salamanca where the Sixth International Conference on Soft ...

The process of globalization entails the acquisition of a construct, cultural intelligence, with which EFL students can function appropriately in intercultural situations. This study was, first, intended to find the relationship between cultural intelligence and the use of expressions of gratitude by Iranian EFL learners. Second, it sought to determine whether there were any significant differe...

The Tactical Language and Culture Training System (TLCTS) helps people quickly acquire communicative skills in foreign languages and cultures. More than 20,000 learners worldwide have used TLCTS courses. TLCTS utilizes artificial intelligence technologies in multiple ways: during the authoring process, and at run time to process learner speech, interpret learner actions, control the response of...