University of Helsinki
May 2018
14-16, Singapore. Trung, Graham and Kristiina attended the 9th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog System Technology (IWSDS 2018).
***Best Paper Award***
Trung presented the paper Enabling Spoken Dialogue Systems for Low-resourced Languages: End-to-end Dialect Recognition for North Sami by Trung Ngo Trong, Kristiina Jokinen and Ville Hautamäki, which won the Best Paper Award.
7-11, Miyazaki, Japan. Kristiina attended the 11th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) and presented a paper on Researching Less-Resourced Languages – the DigiSami Corpus.
Kristiina also attended the LREC workshop AREA (Annotation, Recognition and Evaluation of Actions) and gave a joint paper with Trung on Laughter and Body Movements as Communicative Actions in Encounters.
Kristiina was on the organising committee of the LREC workshop LBRL-MMC (Language and Body in Real Life and Multimodal Corpora) and gave a talk on Conversational Gaze Modelling in First Encounter Robot Dialogues.
November 2017
22-24, Tsukuba, Japan. Graham and Kristiina attended the 9th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2017). They received a Special Recognition award for Best Robot Design (Software Category) for their work on WikiTalk.
October 2017
17-20, Bielefeld, Germany. Kristiina attended the 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction (HAI 2017) and presented joint work with Graham on Expectations and First Experience with a Social Robot.
16-17, Bielefeld, Germany. Kristiina attended the 5th European and 8th Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication (MMSYM 2017) and presented a joint paper with Trung on Conversational topic modelling in first encounter dialogues.
September 2017
11-14, Debrecen, Hungary. Graham attended the 8th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications (CogInfoCom 2017). He gave a talk Bringing Cognitive Infocommunications to small language communities about the work of the DigiSami project.
August 2017
20-24, Stockholm, Sweden.
Kristiina was Area Chair for Spoken Dialog Systems and Analysis of Conversation
at Interspeech 2017.
She was also co-organiser of the Special Session on
Digital Revolution for Under-resourced Languages (DigRev-URL)
(description).
15-17, Saarbrücken, Germany. Kristiina was General Chair of SIGDIAL 2017 together with Manfred Stede.
13-14, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Kristiina was on the Senior Advisory Board for
Young Researchers’ Roundtable for Spoken Dialogue Systems
YRRSDS 2017.
Trung attended YRRSDS and presented work on the application of
end-to-end deep learning to interactive multi-modal systems
(proceedings).
February 2017
Trung finished his M.Sc. Thesis entitled A comprehensive deep learning approach to end-to-end language identification (Fulltext), and applied for PhD status with a thesis plan entitled End-to-end deep learning for interactive multimodal learning.
January 2017
The book Dialogues with Social Robots – Enablements, Analyses, and Evaluation edited by Kristiina and Graham was published by Springer.
Helsinki, Finland. Kristiina held an intensive course Robo-Ope (Robot Teacher) at the Department of Teacher Education at University of Helsinki.
December 2016
11-16, Osaka, Japan.
Graham and Kristiina attended
COLING 2016,
where they gave a Nao robot demonstration
What topic do you want to hear about?
A bilingual talking robot using English and Japanese Wikipedias.
They also attended the COLING Workshop
Open Knowledge Base and Question Answering (OKBQA)
where they gave a talk
Double Topic Shifts in Open Domain Conversations:
Natural Language Interface for a Wikipedia-based Robot Application.
November 2016
Kyoto, Japan. Graham was a Visiting Scholar at Doshisha University in November and December. He was external evaluator for Ms Xiaoyun Wang’s PhD thesis.
Yokosuka, Japan. Kristiina visited NTT Media Intelligence Labs and gave a talk What Topic Do You Want To Hear About? Topic Shifts in Open Domain Conversations.
Saitama, Japan. Kristiina visited KDDI Research Labs and gave a talk Engagement and Social Interaction in Human-Robot Interactions.
12-16, Tokyo, Japan. Kristiina also attended the 18th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2016) and gave a talk Body movements and laughter recognition: experiments in first encounter dialogues at the satellite workshop Multimodal Analyses enabling Artificial Agents in Human–Machine Interaction (MA3HMI) at Tokyo, Japan.
September 2016
29-30, Copenhagen, Denmark. Kristiina was an organiser of the 4th European and 7th Nordic Symposium on Multimodal Communication (MMSYM 2016) and attended the symposium in Copenhagen. She gave a talk Laughing and co-construction of common ground in human conversations.
20-23, Los Angeles, USA. Kristiina attended the 16th Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA-2016) and gave a talk Automated Questions for Chat Dialogues with a Student Office Virtual Agent at the WOCHAT – Workshop on Chatbots and Conversational Agents.
13-15, Los Angeles, USA. Kristiina attended SIGDial 2016, and Young Researchers’ Roundtable on Spoken Dialog Systems (YRRSDS 2016).
8-12, San Francisco, USA. Kristiina attended Interspeech 2016 where she presented the paper Variation in Spoken North Sami Language together with Ville Hautamäki.
August 2016
Trung and Kristiina attended the eNTERFACE Summer School in Enschede, The Netherlands, and participated in the project The Roberta IRONSIDE project: A dialog capable humanoid personal assistant in a wheelchair for dependent persons. Fulltext.
Kristiina was also Invited Speaker and gave a talk Social Engagement via Eye-Gaze in Multimodal Robot Applications
The work at the Summer School resulted in a paper LifeLine Dialogues with Roberta at the Conference Future and Emerging Trends in Language Technology, Machine Learning and Big Data 2016 (FETLT’16) in Seville, Spain.
June 2016
21-24, Bilbao, Spain. Trung attended Odyssey 2016: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop and presented a paper Deep Language: a comprehensive deep learning approach to end-to-end language recognition
May 2016
23-28, Portorož, Slovenia. Kristiina attended the 10th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC-2016) and gave a paper Acoustic Features of Different Types of Laughter in North Sami Conversational Speech in the LREC Workshop Just talking – casual talk among humans and machines.
January 2016
13-16, Saariselkä, Finland. Seventh International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System (IWSDS 2016) was held in Saariselkä, Finland. The whole team attented the meeting and gave presentations titled Towards SamiTalk: a Sami-speaking Robot linked to Sami Wikipedia, Internationalisation and localisation of spoken dialogue systems and DigiSami and Digital Natives: Interaction Technology for the North Sami language.
October 2015
Kristiina visited Moscow Linguistic State University and gave an invited talk Engagement and Autonomous Robot Agents – Social Interaction in the Wikitalk Application. at the International Symposium Gesture research applied to human-computer interaction: The case of robots and virtual agents.
September 2015
6-10, Dresden, Germany. Kristiina attended Interspeech 2015, where she gave a talk on Multimodal engagement in the WikiTalk robot application at the International Workshop on Speech Robotics (IWSR 2015).
2-4, Prague, Czech Republic. Kristiina and Graham attended SIGDIAL 2015, where they gave a presentation on Multilingual WikiTalk: Wikipedia-based talking robots that switch languages.
August 2015
17-21, Oulu, Finland. Ilona gave a presentation at CIFU XII on The variation of adjective attributes in Saami.
June 2015
Helsinki, Finland. Kristiina held an intensive course on human-robot interaction.
May 2015
11-13, Antalya, Turkey. Niklas attended EAMT2015 and presented Content Translation: Computer assisted translation tool for Wikipedia articles.
6, Helsinki, Finland. Kristiina gave a presentation Social Robotics – from Fancy Interface to Interactive Agents at POP-ROBOTICS Helsinki Think Tank event.
April 2015
15, Kitakyushu, Japan. Kristiina gave a presentation Multimodal Interaction in the Nao WikiTalk Application at Waseda University Kitakyushu Campus.
March 2015
25-28, Shonan, Japan. Kristiina was an invited participant at the NII Shonan Meeting Seminar The Future of Human-Robot Spoken Dialogue: from Information Services to Virtual Assistants.
11, Helsinki, Finland. Kristiina and Graham demonstrated a Nao robot at Digital.Finland.Go! – Boosting Business with Digitalisation event at Finlandia Hall where three new Tekes programmes utilizing digitalisation were launched.
Kyoto, Japan. Graham was a Visiting Scholar at Doshisha University in March and April.
January 2015
16, Tromsø, Norway. Two papers from us were accepted to First International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages.
Dember 2014
Kristiina was interviewed on Radio Vega: God morgon Svenskfinland.
19, Finland. Kristiina and Graham were featured in a two page article Moro, sanoi robotti in the Yliopisto magazine.
November 2014
22-28, Helsinki, Finland. Graham, Kristiina and Niklas attended the Finnish Robotics Week event (Robottiviikko 2014) and presented MoroTalk, Finnish WikiTalk and English WikiTalk with Nao robots. We were interviewed and recorded by Iltalehti and Robottiviikko and Graham made an appearance in a news article published in Turun Sanomat.
16, Istanbul, Turkey. Graham attented the Multimodal, Multi-Party, Real-World Human-Robot Interaction workshop (HRI) at 16th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2014).
August 2014
18-22, Turku, Finland. Niklas attended the Langnet Summer School.
May 2014
26-31, Reykjavik, Iceland. Kristiina attended the 9th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC-2014).
14-16, St Petersburg, Russia. Kristiina attended the 4th International Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced Languages (SLTU’14).
February 2014
DigiSami project was mentioned in the Sami language news (Article on YLE website).
Data collection events organised in Enontekiö, Kautokeino, Inari, Utsjoki, and Ivalo. Article in school blog.
January 2014
18-20, Napa, CA, USA. Niklas attended IWSDS 2014 and presented a joint paper by Laxström, Jokinen and Wilcock Situated Interaction in a Multilingual Spoken Information Access Framework.
December 2013
2-5, Budapest, Hungary. Graham attended the CogInfoCom 2013 conference and presented a paper Towards Cloud-based Speech Interfaces for Open-Domain CogInfoCom Systems.
9-13, Sydney. Kristiina co-chaired the ACM ICMI 2013 conference and presented a paper by Wilcock and Jokinen at the main conference. She also co-authored a paper with Lim Kai Keats, Max Friedrich and Jenny Radun at the ICMI GAZE-IN workshop.
November 2013
29, Yle. Kristiina was a panelist in the Yle Robottiviikko (robot week) panel: Robotit: ohjelmoitavasta oppijaksi.
October 2013
17–18, Valletta, Malta. Kristiina was an invited speaker at the 1st European Symposium on Multimodal Interaction. She gave a keynote Studying multimodal communication with eye-tracking.
14, Nagoya, Japan. Kristiina and Graham gave a half-day tutorial at IJCNLP 2013 on Open-domain Conversations with Humanoid Robots.
Sapporo, Japan. Graham was a Visiting Scholar at University of Hokkaido.
September 2013
27-29, Inari, Finland. Kristiina attended Oovtâst – Together conference and gave a talk Finno-Ugric Digital Natives – prospects for open-domain interaction with online content.