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Roddy Cowie

I was born in 1950. I studied philosophy and psychology at Stirling and UCLA as an undergraduate, and received my PhD from Sussex for research on relationships between human and machine vision. I have worked in the psychology department at Queen’s, Belfast since 1975, initially on visual phenomena where people's subjective experience conflict with 'rational' expectations and obvious programming solutions (including impossible objects, misperception of motion, reading errors, and recovery of structure from simple pictures). Research on one of these phenomena, 'speechreading', led to an academic and practical interest in deafness; particularly the subjective experience of deafness, the way deafness affects speech, and computational methods of analyzing the speech problems. The work on speech, with Dr E Douglas-Cowie (QUB), generalised to other speech varieties that convey information about the speaker - varieties associated with social class, mental disorder, 'phone voice', and expressive reading. It led into work on the perception of emotion, where both verbal and visual cues function to convey intensely subjective experiences. In that context, I took part in a series of EC projects (PHYSTA, ORESTEIA, ERMIS, HUMAINE, and SEMAINE). I co-ordinated the HUMAINE network of excellence, and am President of its successor, the HUMAINE Association (for details, see http://www.psych.qub.ac.uk/Staff/Profiles/cowie/index.aspx ) My main outside interests are my family, music, and religion (for details, see http://roddycowie.googlepages.com/home).

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