[2015] Dr Jean Carletta has received a Ten-Year Technical Impact Award from the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), Seattle, 9-13 November 2015. The award was one of two given “in recognition of scientific work in the ICMI community that has stood the test of time.” Multimodal interaction is a new scientific field that underpins advances in how technology uses audio, video and other streams of information to understand human behaviour. Recognition for early open data contribution Dr Carletta says: “The ICMI award recognises the production of an open data set of recorded meetings, known as the AMI Corpus, that is being used for work not just in this field but also in linguistics and psychology. “It is part of a University of Edinburgh tradition of making language data and software available for wider use which goes back at least to the 1980s. Although our team's contributions were unusual for the time, open data is now becoming a mainstream approach. Government agencies are starting to release open data to improve their services. Some research and innovation communities use open data to promote cooperation and faster progress.” Co-authors Dr Carletta was lead author of the paper, with co-authors Simone Ashby, Sebastien Bourban, Mike Flynn, Mael Guillemot, Thomas Hain, Jaroslav Kadlec, Vasilis Karaiskos, Wessel Kraaij, Melissa Kronenthal, Guillaume Lathoud, Mike Lincoln, Agnes Lisowska, Iain McCowan, Wilfried Post, Dennis Reidsma and Pierre Wellner. Current initiatives Dr Carletta is a Senior Research Fellow in our Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation. She is currently involved in two new open data initiatives. The first aims to organise the collection of speech data in 50 European languages. “Such a collection would speed up research and innovation in Conversational Interaction Technology, particularly for the European market,” says Dr Carletta. The second initiative is HeatHack, a community-led collaboration with two Edinburgh churches, City of Edinburgh Methodist Church and Christ Church Morningside, as part of Scientists in Congregations Scotland. HeatHack aims to help third sector organisations reduce their energy costs and improve thermal comfort in their premises by collecting the heating system performance data needed to understand their older buildings. Useful links Dr Carletta’s web page ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction The AMI Corpus HeatHack Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation This article was published on 2024-03-18
