Project Partners - ECIRCUS - EU Framework VI Project - Education through Characters with emotional-Intelligence and Role-playing Capabilities that Understand Social interaction

Heriot-Watt University (UK)
Heriot-Watt is a modern and dynamic technological university, established by Royal Charter in 1966, and committed to excellent teaching and research in its specialist areas of applied sciences and mathematics, engineering and technology, textiles, business management and languages. It has a reputation for enterprise, innovative education and leading edge but practical research, and is one of the top UK universities for income from business and industry.

Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University has some 25 academics supported by research staff, postgraduate students and technicians. Research activities maintain close links with industry, with emphasis on the application of research to the solution of real-world problems. It received a Grade 4 in the UK 2001 Research Assessment Exercise demonstrating that much of its research work is internationally competitive. The Intelligent Systems Laboratory is involved in agent based and knowledge based systems, affective computing, artificial neural networks and evolutionary computing for a range of applications such as computational neuroscience, computer based diagnosis and classification, intelligent user interfaces and
fault-tolerant robotics. Cognitive science researchers are investigating how humans perceive, classify and represent objects, and how skilled movements are guided by vision. Current projects include the neural network modelling of human category learning and the application of psychophysical methods to the evaluation of computer graphics techniques. It has participated in a wide range of industrial collaborative research projects, including 5 major EU projects, as well as traditional EPSRC funded research. It works alongside the Image Systems Engineering Laboratory which has a uniquely broad range of experience and backgrounds, enabling a truly multidisciplinary approach to research which has applications from the
aviation industry to clinical medicine. Its current areas include support of industrial processes using augmented and virtual reality and human computer interaction and human perception in e-learning.

University of Hertfordshire (UK)
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire is one of the largest in the UK, and was awarded a rating of 4 out of 5 in the national Research Assessment Exercise in 1992, 1996 and 2001, recognising that it conducts research of national and international excellence. The Department has attracted funding by such bodies as the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Royal Society, The Nuffield Foundation, EU initiatives, the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), and industry including British Aerospace. Specific expertise of the Department relevant to the current proposal are Adaptive Systems, Algorithms, and Interactive Systems. The Adaptive Systems Research group at University of Hertfordshire is a strongly interdisciplinary group including roboticists, biologists, cognitive scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists. The group has particular expertise in Social Robotics, Robot-Human Interaction, and Socially Intelligent Agents in design, therapy and education, as well as Robot
learning, Learning by Observation, Cognitive Technology, Interactive Systems, Sensor Evolution, Biological Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms, and Evolutionary Computation. Associated to the group is the Hertfordshire Interactive Systems and Robotics Laboratory that is particularly suited for experiments involving physical robots. Members of the group are leading research at an international level and have received funding by UK, European (IST), and other funding agencies. The group includes 15 academic members as well as 15 PhD students.

INESC-ID (Portugal)
INESC-ID, which in Portuguese stands for Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering: Research and Development is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to research in the field of information technology, electronics and telecommunications. Researchers at INESC-ID are in their vast majority university staff and graduate students. INESC-ID initiated activity in the year 2000 as a result of a reorganization of INESC. The former research groups of INESC have been congregated to form INESC-ID, who is owned in large part by IST (a science and technology school of the Technical University of Lisbon) and INESC. The principal objectives of INESC-ID are to conduct cutting-edge research in the fields of information technology and to transfer technology to the industry by means of R&D contracts and training courses.

INESC is well-known for its importance in creating and increasing the value of Portuguese SME's, with which the institution maintains close links through various contracts of technical and specialised assistance. The activity of INESC-ID is divided in 5 scientific and technological areas: Information Systems, Signal Processing, Electronic Systems, Telecommunications and Solid State Technology. Each of these areas is further divided in several research groups led by senior researchers.

INESC-ID has about 80 researchers. Of these, 50 are senior researchers holding a PhD degree or equivalent, and the remaining are preparing their Master's or PhD dissertations. Since IST is the main owner of INESCID, the majority of researchers also have teaching positions at IST.

Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg (Germany)
The University of Bamberg has departments on psychology, education science, business and administration, linguistics and applied computer science. The members of the Institute for Theoretical Psychology (IfTP) work mainly in the field of cognitive science. The goal is the investigation of a theory of human mind integrating the different functional architectures on perception, motivation, cognition and emotion. Different projects are concerned with cognitive modelling, cross-cultural problem solving, problem solving in groups, problem solving in design, and training on problem solving. The head of the department is Professor Dr. Dörner, who is famous for his work on human failure in dealing with complexity and uncertainty. The group at the Institute of Theoretical Psychology has accumulated much experience in investigating people dealing with complex, computer-simulated tasks, and in programming computer-models of various psychological phenomena, such as visual perception, action regulation, emotion, personality, and group interaction. Bamberg was a partner of the FP5 project VICTEC in which they have contributed to earlier work on empathic agents.

University of Sunderland(UK)
The University of Sunderland is a dynamic, modern university with high standards of teaching and research and a growing reputation as the university for enterprise, employment and opportunity. It has schools in business; art, design, media and culture; computing and technology; education and lifelong learning; and health and social sciences.

The School of Computing & Technology has a strong and growing research profile with 5 EPSRC, 5 EUfunded and 6 commercially sponsored projects and around 80 registered research students. The School has a strong track record in the area of interactive media. It is a Macromedia Authorised Training Partner, provides post-graduate courses in interactive media management participates in a range of national and international projects in interactive media and leads the Northern IT Reach Out project.

The School of Computing and Technology has particular strengths in the development of participatory design approaches, classroom-based studies, children’s interaction needs and requirements and new media
development and production. It has extensive new facilities for usability testing of innovative technology and new media production. The University has, partnership and sponsorship with companies such as Sony, British Telecom, Macromedia, Microsoft, etc. and has strong links with the Digital Media sector through Codeworks (Centre of Digital Excellence).

Augsburg University(Germany)
The working tasks assigned to Augsburg University will be conducted by the Lab for Multimedia Concepts and their Applications. The Lab is part of the Institute for Computer Science and has a long-term experience in the design, the implementation and evaluation of multimodal user interfaces and intelligent interactive systems. The work is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. Projects are usually conducted by an interdisciplinary team consisting of computer scientists, electro-engineers, media designers, cognitive psychologists.

The team has been involved in the organization of a number of international events, such as the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Multi-Modal Dialogue in Mobile Environments (IDS 2002), the Second
conference on Computational Semiotics for Games and New Media (COSIGN 2002), a Dagstuhl Workshop on Evaluating Conversational Agents in March 2004 and a Tutorial and Research Workshop on Affective Dialogue Systems in June 2004. Strong National and International co-operations with various industrial partners, such as Honda or Siemens AG, in the area of affective virtual characters enhance the competencies of the team.

Activities of the team related to the planned project include: work on affective interfaces within the European FP6 Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotion (Humaine) and research done in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Lewis Johnson, University of Southern California, within the APA project on affective pedagogical agents funded by Bacatec (Bavarian California Technology Center).

Webpage of the team: http://mm-werkstatt.informatik.uni-augsburg.de

Wuerzburg University(Germany)
The Psychologisches Institut der Universität Würzburg focuses on Educational and developmental Psychology and involves two Professors, six other academics and fifteen researchers. It is involved in a substantial research programme with five projects funded by the German Research Foundation, including a longitudinal study of Theory of Mind and Metacognition in schoolchildren and a project autobiographical memory, eyewitness reports, and suggestibility in children and adults.

Interagens(Italy)
Interagens s.r.l. (http://www.interagens.com) is a software start-up located in Rome, Italy, that provides organizations with advanced communication and education services based on lifelike computer characters. Interagens has received several prizes and grants: the business idea got the 1st prize from BIC Lazio (Business Innovation Center of the Lazio Region, Italy), and the business plan has been awarded grants from the City of Rome, the Province of Rome, and the e2blab business incubator. Interagens has developed a patent-pending innovative technology for authoring and controlling lifelike computer characters, which has been rated 1st in a public competition for funding. The company is a brainchild of Paola Rizzo.

University of Warwick(UK)
The University of Warwick in Coventry is one of the leading universities in the United Kingdom. Established in 1965 as part of a government initiative to expand access to higher education, Warwick has grown to become one of the highest-ranked universities in the UK, consistently in the top 10 since its inception.
The Department of Psychology was founded in 1974 and is part of the Science Faculty. It has particular strengths in developmental, cognitive and experimental psychology, in the areas of bullying, memory, reasoning, categorization, ageing, vision and attention, normal and disturbed reading and spelling as well as speech. The Department has attracted funding by such bodies as the European Commission and The Economic and Social Research Council, UK.
http://www.warwick.ac.uk

Created on 03/30/2006 04:55 PM by ecirweb
Updated on 03/08/2007 03:23 PM by ecirweb