Interaction and visualisation
Interaction paradigms
Digiteo partners explore new interaction techniques as well as new tools for developing these techniques, and new methods for controlling the design process of interactive systems.
Some of them focus on the invention and development of new interaction devices and paradigms between users and computer-based systems. Others are focused on developing interfaces with natural communication with the user, employing all the human communication modalities (speech, gesture...) and adapting to any disabilities, to increase the uptake of the systems and reduce their cost. It is the case, for instance, of interfaces that are adapted (or adaptable) to their contexts of use by taking advantage of the complementary aspects of humans and computers. In the long run, these researches seek to create a new generation of
interactive environments as an alternative to the current generation of desktop environments.
One use of these new interfaces is in the context of ambient intelligence and pervasive environments in which human will be able to interact with everyday objects in a direct, situated and more flexible way.
Other new forms of interfaces studied by Digiteo partners are based on virtual agents (Embodied conversational agents, virtual humans) able to mediate the interaction with computational systems through language and emotional cues.
Information search and dialog systems
This topic mainly focuses on knowledge engineering, multimedia and multilingual information research, multimedia document indexing and semantic analysis of multimedia documents (image and video). One of the main concerns of this topic is written and spoken language analysis (and synthesis) for which Digiteo has a well-established expertise.
These researches aim at providing tools for multimedia document automatic indexing through semantic and structural elements extracted from text, speech or images and videos in more generally from unstructured documents (e.g. from the internet). They also focus on the development of question and answer systems and on their coupling with information research, allowing them to integrate extra linguistic elements such as prosody or emotional content.
Visualisation
Another important topic concerns the development of multimodal and multi-scale interfaces for interactive visualisation of large data sets. It leads to the study of the visualisation process and to the development of new software tools for the display and visual exploration of such data.
The heterogeneity of the structures, the dynamics or the presence of high abstraction level and meta-data lead to very complex visualisation challenges. The high dimensionality of the data (much greater than the display capabilities) is also an obstacle to their representation and lead to the use of multimodal channels like haptic and audio.
