This volume presents important results of the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) "Situated Artificial Communicators," which was funded by grants from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) for more than twelve years.

The contributions focus on different aspects of human-human and human-machine interaction in situations which closely model everyday workplace demands. The authors are linguists, psycho- und neurolinguists, psychologists and computer scientists at Bielefeld University. They jointly tackle questions of...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI-95, held in Bielefeld in September 1995.
The volume opens with full versions of four invited papers devoted to the topic "From Intelligence Models to Intelligent Systems." The main part of the book consists of 17 refereed full papers carefully relected by the program committee; these papers are organized in sections on knowledge organization and optimization, logic and reasoning, nonmonotonicity, action and change, and spatial reasoning.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Gesture and Sign Languages in Human-Computer Interaction, GW 2001, held in London, UK, in April 2001.
The 25 revised full papers and 8 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the post-proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on gesture recognition, recognition of sign languages, nature and notations of sign languages, gesture and sign language synthesis, gestural action and interaction, and applications based on gesture control.

This book presents the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of an International Workshop on Gesture and Sign Language in Human-Computer Interaction held in Bielefeld, Germany, in 1997.
The book presents 25 revised papers together with two invited lectures. Recently, gesture and sign language have become key issues for advanced interface design in the humanization of computer interaction: AI, neural networks, pattern recognition, and agent techniques are having a significant impact on this area of research and development. The papers are organized in sections on semiotics for...

Embodied agents play an increasingly important role in cognitive interaction technology. The two main types of embodied agents are virtual humans inhabiting simulated environments and humanoid robots inhabiting the real world. So far research on embodied communicative agents has mainly explored their potential for practical applications. However, the design of communicative artificial agents can also be of great heuristic value for the scientific study of communication. It allows researchers to isolate, implement, and test essential properties of inter-agent communications in operational...

The International Gesture Workshops (GW) are interdisciplinary events for those researching gesture-based communication across the disciplines. The focus of these events is a shared interest in understanding gestures and sign language in their many facets, and using them for advancing human-machine interaction. Since 1996, International Gesture Workshops have been held roughly every second year, with fully reviewed proceedings published by Springer. The International Gesture Workshop GW 2009 was hosted by Bielefeld University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF - Zentrum fur...

Alignment in Communication is a novel direction in communication research, which focuses on interactive adaptation processes assumed to be more or less automatic in humans. It offers an alternative to established theories of human communication and also has important implications for human-machine interaction. A collection of articles by international researchers in linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, and social robotics, this book provides evidence on why such alignment occurs and the role it plays in communication. Complemented by a discussion of methodologies and...