Université de Paris VIII

The IUT of Montreuil is part of the University of Paris VIII. The technologies and communications research group, from the LINC-Paragraphe laboratory, was created in April 2000 at the IUT of Montreuil. Research is focused around two main themes: communication and technology. The goal is to define paradigms and interaction models for human-machine communication. In particular the group is interested in defining the necessary bases for a personalized and adapted interaction to each user’s need; that is an interaction in which the content of the information presented to the user is adapted to his/her needs and capacities through the means of adaptive hypermedia and embodied conversational agents. The approach undertaken by the research team is pluri-disciplinary by nature and is based on various fields: heterogeneous databases, computer vision, decision making, fuzzy logic, multi-modality, hypermedia, conversational agent. Several tools have and are being developed to achieve such a goal, namely: representation language of multi-modal behavior, quantification of multi-modal behavior using linguistic values, representation of gesture expressiveness. The group have also developed a platform for creating and animating embodied conversational agents.

Catherine Pelachaud is and has been involved in several projects related to multimodal communication at a European level (EAGLES, IST-ISLE, IST-MagiCster).She received a PhD in Computer Graphics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA in 1991. Since 2002, she is a professor at the University of Paris 8. In 1993-94, she has collaborated with Norman Badler, Justine Cassell and Mark Steedman on the elaboration of one of the first embodied conversational agents system. She has been co-organiser of several workshops on embodied conversational agents. Her research interest includes representation language for agent, embodied conversational agent, nonverbal communication (face, gaze, and gesture), expressive gesture and multimodal interfaces.