PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The International Gesture Workshops (GW) are interdisciplinary events for those researching gesture-based communication across the disciplines. The focus of these events is a shared interest in understanding gestures and sign language in their many facets, and using them for advancing human-machine interaction. Since 1996, international gesture workshops have been held roughly every second year, with fully reviewed post-proceedings published by Springer-Verlag. The International Gesture Workshop GW 2009 was hosted by Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF – Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung) on February 25-27, 2009. As its predecessors, GW 2009 aimed to provide a platform for participants to share, discuss, and criticize recent and novel research with a multidisciplinary audience. More than 70 computer scientists, linguistics, psychologists, neuroscientists or dance and music scientists from 16 countries met to present and exchange their newest results under the umbrella theme ``Gesture in Embodied Communication and Human-Computer Interaction''. Consistent with the steady growth of research activity in this area, a large number of high- quality submissions were received, which made GW 2009 an exciting and important event for anyone interested in gesture-related technological research relevant to human-computer interaction. In line with the practice of previous gesture workshops, presenters were invited to submit theirs papers for publication in a subsequent peer-reviewed publication of high quality. The present book is the outcome of this effort. Representing the research work from eight countries, it contains a selection of 28 thoroughly reviewed articles. An invited contribution by keynote speaker Asli ürek (Radboud University Nijmegen & Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) addresses behavioral and brain research on the mechanisms that underlie processing of high-level multimodal semantic information conveyed through speech and hand gestures during production and comprehension of utterances. The invited contribution by keynote speaker Antonio Camurri and colleagues (InfoMus Lab, DIST – University of Genova) presents a survey of their research on analysis of expressive gesture and how it is evolving towards the analysis of expressive social interaction in groups of users. Further included is the extended abstract of keynote speaker Alex Waibel's contribution on multimodal interfaces in support of human-human interaction. The papers in this book are ordered in eight sections pertaining to the following themes: Brain and Behavioral Analysis of Gesture, Concepts of Gesture, Gesture Recognition, Gesture Processing, Gesture Simulation, Gesture-based Interfaces, Sign Language. The work presented in these papers encompasses a multitude of research areas from among: Cognitive and psychological mechanisms of gesture; gestures in context and multi-modality; theoretical conceptions of gesture; automatic recognition, interpretation, and synthesis of gestures and sign language; specification and computational representation of gestures; realtime and continuous gesture and human-movement tracking; automatic processing and analysis of gestural behaviors; gesture and musical performances; user issues and interface paradigms; application in interactive systems.