A powerful longitudinal study has failed to find any evidence that newborn babies can imitate facial gestures, hand movements or vocalisations. After 40 years of uncertainty, these findings indicate that humans learn to imitate; this capacity is not inborn.

Understanding the intentions and desires of those around us is vital for adapting to a dynamic social environment. In this paper, a novel event-related functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) paradigm with dynamic and natural stimuli (2s video clips) was developed to directly examine the neural networks associated with processing of gestures with social intent as compared to nonsocial inte...

Cued Speech is a communication system that complements lip-reading with a small set of possible handshapes placed in different positions near the face. Developing a Cued Speech capable system is a time-consuming and difficult challenge. This paper focuses on how an existing bank of reference Cued Speech gestures, exhibiting natural dynamics for hand articulation and movements, could be reused f...

Emotionally salient stimuli such as naturalistic scenes, facial expressions and emotional body language elicit increased neuronal activation in associative sensory cortex, as well affective cortical and sub-cortical networks. It has been suggested, that the affective quality of these stimuli is largely a result of evolutionary predisposition and that their selective perceptual encoding may thus...

One of the most important motivations for many humanoid robot projects is that robots with a human-like body and human-like senses could in principle be capable of intuitive multimodal communication with people. The general idea is that by mimicking the way humans interact with each other, it will be possible to transfer the efficient and robust communication strategies that humans use in their...

Autonomous Speaker Agent (ASA) is a graphically embodied animated agent capable of reading plain English text and rendering it in a form of speech, accompanied by appropriate, natural-looking facial gestures [1]. This paper is focused on improving ASA’s head movement trajectories in order to achieve facial gestures that look as natural as possible. Based on the gathered data we proposed mathema...

Speaking avatars are present in many Human Computer Interaction (HCI) applications. Their importance lies in communicative goals which entail interaction within other avatars in virtual worlds or in marketing where they have become useful in customer push strategies. Generating automatic and plausible animations from speech cues have become a challenge. We present BodySpeech, an automatic syste...

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) have marked difficulties using verbal and non-verbal communication for social interaction. The ASC-Inclusion project helps children with ASC by allowing them to learn how emotions can be expressed and recognised via playing games in a virtual world. The platform assists children with ASC to understand and express emotions through facial expressi...

The recognition of human gestures and facial expressions in image sequences is an important and challenging problem that enables a host of human-computer interaction applications. This paper describes a framework for incremental recognition of human motion that extends the “Condensation” algorithm proposed by Isard and Blake (ECCV’96). Human motions are modeled as temporal trajectories of some ...