T-Systems Nova GmbH

T-Systems is a division of Deutsche Telekom. The company has a strong research programme which aims to create new solutions for today's marketplaces, as well as developing next-generation models for the telecom, IT and convergence markets of the future.

The research group consists of approx. 10 experts from different fields of work (phoneticians, psychologists, speech synthesis and recognition experts, computer scientists, natural dialog specialists) who are working together on emotional human-machine communication. The work will lead to the development of a demonstrator application - an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) in form of an autonomous agent with avatar interface that accounts for users’ emotions, has internal emotional states that influence selected action and expresses emotional output.

The group bring a valuable market interest and experience to the network through their technology scouting, market scans and usability studies for systems with emotional interfaces.

Dr. Felix Burkhardt has a longstanding background in language technology. His Ph.D. thesis is entitled: "Simulation of Emotional Speech with Speech Synthesis". Originally an expert of Speech Synthesis at the Technical University of Berlin, he has been working with T-Systems as a Voice- Portals developer since 2000. He is involved in the development of the VoiceXML-based toolbox and does tutoring and consulting in VoiceXML and Voice-Portal architectures. In parallel, he works as a consultant regarding Text-to-Speech Synthesis and emotional human-machine interfaces. Furthermore he's an experienced Java-Programmer and J2EE-architect based on the work in many projects regarding multimedia-streaming applications and Voice-Portals.

Dr. Jin Liu received her BS degree from the University of Science and Technology of China, in 1982, and her diploma and Ph.D. degrees from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany in the areas of speech synthesis and speech recognition in 1985 and 1989, respectively. She then joined the Heinrich- Hertz-Institut Berlin, where she has been involved in national and EU research projects (e.g. COST, DISTIMA, PANORAMA) related to 3D techniques for television and video communications (3D image analysis and synthesis, psycho-optical foundations of stereo image coding), interactive multimedia services (image processing for multi-view systems, autostereoscopic displays) as well as advanced interactive user interface for multimodal and multimedia terminals (speech, gesture, gaze). Since Dec. 2001, she has been working with T-Systems in the department of Advanced Voice Solution and has participated in various projects within Deutsche Telekom, among other things the activities in international standard bodies and the project "emotional human-computer interaction".