Invited speakers

David Forsyth (University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne)

Talk Title: "Still Looking at People"

There is a great need for programs that can describe what people are doing from video. This is difficult to do, because it is hard to identify and track people in video sequences, because we have no canonical vocabulary for describing what people are doing, and because phenomena such as aspect and individual variation greatly affect the appearance of what people are doing. Recent work in kinematic tracking has produced methods that can report the kinematic configuration of the body fairly accurately and fully automatically. It is more difficult to know what to say about the people one sees. One way to do so is to build discriminative methods, but this fails when one has to deal with unfamiliar activities. Alternatively, one could build compositional methods that assemble new motions out of known pieces. Finally, one could try to describe movements in narrative terms, by trying to represent the goals of the movers and the attributes of their motion. I will describe recent progress in each area.

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Nico van der Aa and Lucas Noldus (Noldus Information Technology) NEW!

Talk Title: “Automatic recognition of human behavior: from technical breakthroughs to practical applications”

Bio: Nico van der Aa (Ph.D. Technical University of Eindhoven, 2007) is computer vision researcher at Noldus Information Technology, a developer of innovative tools for behavioral research. After obtaining his Ph.D. title in numerical mathematics, he became involved in image processing and computer vision techniques. He is currently involved in GATE (Game research for training and entertainment), where he cooperates with the Multimedia & Geometry group at the department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University to develop automatic tools for capturing human behavior from video streams in challenging environments like the Restaurant of the Future.

Bio: Lucas Noldus (Ph.D. Wageningen University, 1989) is the founder and director of Noldus Information Technology, a developer of innovative tools for behavioral research. His company develops software tools and integrated measurement systems for the study of human behavior and human-system interaction, ranging from data collection and analysis software to complete behavioral research facilities (such as the “Restaurant of the Future”). Lucas Noldus authored numerous peer-reviewed papers and conference presentations about methods and techniques in behavioral research. Dr. Noldus is chairman of the Bioscience Forum, member of the Netherlands Academy of Technology and Innovation, and member of board of the ICT Innovation Platform Brain & Cognition.

Elisabeth Oberzaucher (Vienna University).

Talk Title: "Environmental aesthetics - how evolutionary considerations can help us to make public space work. " In this talk i will give some ideas of how we can design environments, so people can socially interact, remain longer in this area, or pass through most directly, and how visual processing can be useful in monitoring these environments.

Bio: Elisabeth Oberzaucher completed her M.Sc. degree in zoology in 2000 and her PhD in anthropology in 2003. Research topics include nonverbal communication and human-environment interactions.and evolutionary aesthetics, i.e. how we can design environments, so people can socially interact, remain longer in this area, or pass through most directly, and how visual processing can be useful in monitoring these environments. She worked as a senior scientist at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology from 2003 to 2009 and as a lecturer at the University of Vienna since 2002. Since 2010 she is senior researcher at the University of Vienna.

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Eric Laurier (Edinburgh University)

Talk Title:Interaction between cafe staff and their regulars: maintaining and repairing relationships.

In this talk I will examine how regulars and staff establish where their relationship lies on a zone between distance and intimacy. Using video recordings of customer-staff interactions in a cafe I will concentrate on what is distinct about customers who are a 'regular'. The video recordings will allow me highlight the moment-by-moment production of the relationship and how it draws upon verbal, visual, gestural and architectural resources.