Personalization constitutes the mechanisms and technologies necessary to customize information access to the end-user. It can be defined as the automatic adjustment of information content, structure, and presentation. The central thesis of this dissertation is that modeling interaction explicitly in a representation, and studying how partial information can be harnessed in it by program transfo...

This paper investigates to what extent breathing can be used as a cue to turn-taking behaviour. The paper improves on existing accounts by considering all possible transitions between speaker states (silent, speaking, backchanneling) and by not relying on global speaker models. Instead, all features (including breathing range and resting expiratory level) are estimated in an incremental fashion...

The sustained use of cookstoves that are introduced to reduce fuel use or air pollution needs to be objectively monitored to verify the sustainability of these benefits. Quantifying stove adoption requires affordable tools, scalable methods and validated metrics of usage. We quantified the longitudinal patterns of chimney-stove use of 80 households in rural Guatemala, monitored with Stove Use M...

Video content creators invest enormous effort creating work that is in turn typically viewed passively. However, learning tasks using video requires users not only to consume the content but also to engage, interact with, and repurpose it. Furthermore, to promote learning with video in domains where content creators are not necessarily videographers, it is important that capture tools facilitat...

During conversation listeners have to perform several tasks simultaneously. They have to comprehend their interlocutor's turn, while also having to prepare their own next turn. Moreover, a careful analysis of the timing of natural conversation reveals that next speakers also time their turns very precisely. This is possible only if listeners can predict accurately when the speaker's turn is goi...