Conversational informatics investigates human behaviour with a view to designing conversational artifacts capable of interacting with humans in a conversational fashion. It spans a broad array of topics including linguistics, psychology and human-computer interaction. Until recently research in such areas has been carried out in isolation, with no attempt made to connect the various disciplines. Advancements in science and technology have changed this. Conversational Informatics provides an interdisciplinary introduction to conversational informatics and places emphasis upon the integration of scientific approaches to achieve engineering goals and to advance further understanding of conversation. It features a collection of surveys structured around four prominent research areas: conversational artifacts, conversational contents, conversation environment design and conversation measurement, analysis and modelling Conversational artifacts shows how synthetic characters or intelligent robots use eye gaze, gestures and other non-verbal communicators to interact. Conversational contents looks at developing techniques for acquiring, editing, distributing and utilising the contents that are produced and consumed in conversation. Conversation environment design explains techniques for creating intelligent virtual environments and for representing individuals within a virtual environment by monitoring and reproducing their non-verbal conversational behaviour. Conversation measurement, analysis and modelling demonstrate how conversational behaviour can be measured and analyzed. Conversational Informatics will be an invaluable resource for postgraduate students and researchers in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering as well as engineers and developers working in the field of automation, robotics and agents technology.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the First WICI International Workshop on Web Intelligence meets Brain Informatics, WImBI 2006, which was held in Beijing, China, in December 2006. The workshop explores a new perspective of Web Intelligence (WI) research from the viewpoint of Brain Informatics (BI). The 26 revised full-length papers presented together with three introductory lectures have been carefully reviewed and selected.

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 proceedings published by Springer. The International Gesture Workshop GW 2009 was hosted by Bielefeld University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF – Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung) during February 25–27, 2009. Like 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 as well as 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.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of four workshops held as satellite events of the JSAI International Symposia on Artificial Intelligence 2011, in Takamatsu, Japan, in December 2011. The 25 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous papers. The papers are organized in four sections according to the four workshops: Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS), Juris-Informatics (JURISIN), Algorithms for Large-Scale Information Processing in Knowledge Discovery (ALSIP), and Multimodality in Multispace Interaction (MiMI).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Brain Informatics, BI 2011, held in Lanzhou, China, in September 2011. The 27 revised full papers and 6 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. They are grouped in topcial sections on thinking and perception-centric investigations of human information processing systems; information technologies for the management, analysis and use of brain data; cognition-inspired applications. Furthermore, there is a section with 8 papers from the workshop on meta-synthesis and complex systems.

This book covers an approach to conversational informatics which encompasses science and technology for understanding and augmenting conversation in the network age. A major challenge in engineering is to develop a technology for conveying not just messages but also underlying wisdom. Relevant theories and practices in cognitive linguistics and communication science, as well as techniques developed in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, are discussed.

This edited volume is about how unprejudiced approaches to real human cognition can improve the design of AI. It covers many aspects of human cognition and across 12 chapters the reader can explore multiple approaches about the complexities of human cognitive skills and reasoning, always guided by experts from different but complimentary academic fields. A central concept is explained: blended cognition, the natural skill of human beings for combining constantly different heuristics during their several task-solving activities. Something that was sometimes observed like a problem as “bad reasoning”, is now the central key for the understanding of the richness, adaptability and creativity of human cognition. The topic of this book connects in a significant way with the disciplines of psychology, neurology, anthropology, philosophy, logics, engineering, logics, and AI. In a nutshell: understanding better humans for designing better machines. Any person with interests on natural and artificial reasoning should read this book as a primary source of inspiration and a way to achieve a critical thinking on these topics.