July 16 - August 10, 2007 Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey Prof. Bülent Sankur, Chair Published by: TELE (Communications and Remote Sensing Lab) Université catholique de Louvain Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium http://www.tele.ucl.ac.be ISBN: 978-2-87463-105-4 Credits: Cover design: Hamdi Dibeklioglu˘ (BUMM) & Colin Michel (UCL-TELE) LATEX editors: Christian Frisson (UCL-TELE) & Rémy Lehembre (UCL-TELE) using LATEX’s ‘confproc’ class by Vincent Verfaille Printed in Louvain-la-Neuve by Ciaco — December 2007 Proceedings of the eNTERFACE’07 Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, Istanbul,˙ Turkey, July 16 - August 10, 2007 Foreword from Bülent Sankur, Conference Chair eNTERFACE’07 took place in Istanbul,˙ at the campus of the Bogaziçi˘ University during July 15 - August 12 period. This one month long workshop was attended by 140 people overall, including short-term advisors and invited speakers. The workshop was organized around 12 projects, for which there was a six-month long definition phase. The projects were formed with the contributions not only the originators but also with the consequent inputs from the invited scientists. The projects were classified into four categories: 1. Synthesis & Analysis Category : Multimodal Speaker Identity Conversion; Audio-Driven Human Body Motion Analysis and Synthesis; Audiovisual Content Generation Controlled by Physiological Signals for Clinical and Artistic Application; Real-time and Accurate Musical Control of Expression in Singing Synthesis 2. Multimodal Interaction Category : Advanced Multimodal Interfaces for Flexible Communications; Event Recognition for Meaningful Human-Computer Interaction in a Smart Environment: Mobile- phone Based Gesture Recognition 3. Biometric Interfaces Category : 3D Face Recognition Performance under Adversarial Conditions; Benchmark for Multimodal Biometric Authentication 4. Medical Interfaces Category : Multi-Approach DT-MRI Data Analysis & Visualization Platform; IMAG Tool: A Software for Real-time Elastography and Tensorial Elastography; Multimodal Frame- work for the Communication of Disabled The workshop hosted several international speakers from Stanford University, USA to University of Genoa, Italy, from University of Cambridge, UK to Berkeley, USA, from National Council of Research, Italy to Télécom Paris. The workshop had a very active social program that extended from historical city tour to a weekend in the Prince’s Island, to increase social contacts and cement long-term interactions between diverse groups. This workshop was enabled with the financial aid from three sources: 1. SIMILAR FP6 project 2. TUBITAK (Turkish National Research Council) 3. Bogaziçi˘ University Foundation The funds from SIMILAR Project, about 55% of the 40.000 Euro budget was spent to build the infrastruc- ture, to provide scholarships to undergraduates and for social organization. The funds from TUBITAK were spent entirely for invited speakers and for additional aid to selected eNTERFACE participants. The aid from Bogaziçi˘ University Foundation enabled us to appropriate and to use 1000 m2 of the Engineering complex with all its associated services. The participants were lodged in the comfortable suites of Superdorm, a modern luxury dormitory facility of Bogaziçi˘ University. The polls we conducted at various levels, from experts to the M.Sc students indicated unanimously that workshop has provided them with invaluable experiences in project cooperation and teamwork and has been instrumental in increasing their research motivation. Almost all participants expressed a desire to participate themselves to future workshop and/or to exhort their younger cohorts in this direction. Bülent Sankur Conference Chair iii Proceedings of the eNTERFACE’07 Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, Istanbul,˙ Turkey, July 16 - August 10, 2007 eNTERFACE Workshops Motivations Reflexions by Bülent Sankur, BUMM - Bogaziçi˘ University Multimedia Group Bogaziçi˘ University Multimedia (BUMM) students and faculty have been participating to the previous eNTERFACE activities. Their first-hand impressions show that the eNTERFACE work- shops have been instrumental in increasing the research motivation of our students and have pro- vided them with invaluable experiences in project cooperation and teamwork. We have been therefore very enthusiastic about SIMILAR project in general and about eNTERFACE’07 in particular, and we strongly believe in the benefits of such workshops. At eNTERFACEs, seeds of long lasting partnerships can be planted. We were involved in the planning stage of the third workshop in the triad of eNTERFACEs in Mons, Dubrovnik and Istanbul. Among our endeavors we had planned to extend the invitation for participation beyond SIMILAR to all other FP6 project groups with concordant themes. We have realized projects on novel themes, such as man-machine interfaces in finance, bio-informatics and security. by Igor S. Pandžic,´ Organizer of eNTERFACE’06 eNTERFACE’06 took place in Dubrovnik, Croatia, at the peak of summer tourist season. With the venue 500 m from the historic city center and two minutes walk from the beach, the big ques- tion we were asked was: “how will you get people to work there?”. In fact, the 65 participating researchers and students were so motivated that such questions quickly became pointless and days passed in a busy and creative working atmosphere in the two classrooms filled with computers and electronics. Yet no one could accuse the eNTERFACE’06 participants of being mere geeks - in the evenings and weekends a lively and versatile social scene developed. With the organized social program serving as a basis, partici- pants have organized numerous activities: sports tournaments, excursions, cultural events as well as a spicy nightlife featuring beach parties. All together, eNTERFACE’06 turned out to be a well-rounded mix of research, learning and fun. With such basis, I hope and believe that some of the seeds planted in Dubrovnik will grow into full-blown research collaborations of the future. As the memories of the more mundane organizational chores fade from memory, what is left is pure satisfaction of being part of the unique series of events that is eNTERFACE. iv Proceedings of the eNTERFACE’07 Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, Istanbul,˙ Turkey, July 16 - August 10, 2007 eNTERFACE Workshops Motivations Reflexions by Thierry Dutoit, Initiator of the eNTERFACE concept and organizer of eNTER- FACE’05 I take this opportunity to mention how the idea of eNTERFACE came to life in mid 2003, when the core committee of SIMILAR (the European Network of Excellence on Multimodal Inter- faces), was busy establishing its list of workpackages. It is basically a three acts play. Act 1. I have been a researcher since 1987. It is therefore becoming hard to navigate in the “conferences” directory of my laptop. Small to big, short to long, close to far away, I think I have tried them all. One of them, however, will last forever in my memory as the most productive meeting I have ever attended. It was a summer school on Prosody, in July 1993, organized by the ELSNET (already a scientific network). I spent two weeks there, at UCL London, attending lectures and, more importantly, taking labs with my fellow PhD students from all over the world. I must say this is simply the place where I met most of my friends for life! Act 2. In 1996, I had the opportunity to work for AT&T at Bell Labs for 1.5 years, in the TTS group. This was set about 2 years after I finished my PhD (i.e., 2 years after I had signed with Kluwer for writing the “3-months-of-work” book in TTS I took 3 years to complete; I finished it at AT&T...). It was clear to me that I was then about to meet the greatest gurus in speech processing (yet I had underestimated the number of famous people who were working in this lab), and that I would work with the best maintained software archive in the world (you snap your finger, and you get what you were looking for; this, I had overestimated..). I did meet all these people, and the atmosphere was such that meeting each other was really easy, but I also realized something I had never imagined: research in the US is a huge network thing. Network in terms of “You seldom work on your own on a problem”, but also in terms of “Be with the network; the network will take care of you”. In other words, research is very much advertised and supported by your employer, by all sorts of professional organizations, and even among the general public. Hence its dynamics. Act 3. I was aware of the successful DARPA workshops on speech recognition organized yearly by Prof. Fred Jelinek at Johns Hopkins University. Funded by the Defense Agency (which implies a strong financial support), these workshops have progressively become a “must” for researchers in the field, who come from all around the world to participate. One of our researchers took part to it, and my ex-colleague Hervé Bourlard, now the Director of IDIAP in Switzerland, was an active member of it. I have always envied this event, and dreamt of finding money to organize something SIMILAR. Thanks to EU financing, and with special care from SIMILAR, this dream has come true. With its 55 researchers from 15 countries all around the world working together for four weeks on seven pre-selected projects, eNTERFACE’05 in Mons, Belgium, has been a great success. eNTERFACE’06, gathering in Dubrovnik, Croatia, 63 researchers from 12 countries organized in 9 teams, has been even more successful. eNTERFACE’06 in Dubrovnik, Croatia, gathering 63 researchers from 12 countries organized in 9 teams, has been even more successful. Long life to eNTERFACE workshops! v Proceedings of the eNTERFACE’07 Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, Istanbul,˙ Turkey, July 16 - August 10, 2007 Organizers at Bogaziçi˘ University Medical Interfaces Brain and Face Interfaces Burak Acar Bülent Sankur Dept. of Electrical-Electronic Engineering Dept. of Electrical-Electronic Engineering Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Gestural Interfaces Speech Interfaces Lale Akarun Levent Arslan Department of Computer Engineering Dept.