Past Projects

ReelLives

September 1, 2013

The ReelLives project was the output of a EPSRC sandpit in digital personhood. It was a collaborative project between Northumberland University, University of Edinburgh, Birmingham University and the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University. Other PIs were Pam Briggs, Finola Kerrigan and Harith Alani. It was a really lovely multi-disciplinary project and I loved working with the everyone on this project. It bought together film marketting, social psychology and technology and produced some very insightful outputs.

Aria Valuspa

January 1, 2015

Official EU Site

Project Website

Dr Aylett made a significant contribution to the proposal for this Horizon H2020 grant. He was the PI for the project for CereProc. The Noxi database and the(non)verbal Annotator Tool (NOVA) were the outputs of the project together with a downloadable working system which allowed interaction with an Alice character to explore the book - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

Grassroot Wavelengths

July 1, 2019

The aim of the Grassroot Wavelengths project is to pilot solutions for participatory innovation in the domain of media pluralism, working to: lower the barriers to start and sustain a community radio station, create regional and European-wide networks of stations that can pool community-level resources and co-innovate collaborative media services, and increase the permeability and impact of those stations through a combination of existing digital and nondigital technologies.

The IET, PDM-owner, via Wikimedia Commons

TAS GAIL - Go Ahead I'm Listening

April 1, 2023

This project aimed to build a demonstrator (human-like active listener) that provides positive non-verbal backchannels (e.g., nodding) to a human to test whether this type of behaviour can lead to overtrust and oversharing through a user study. The result will be an open source system for the TAS community to build robots with adequate human-like behaviours.

Affinity: Developing Fluid Turn Taking For Haru

January 1, 2024

The Affinity project aims to move Haru closer to the target of natural, flexible and effective speech interaction. This project is integrating a state-of-the-art conversational listener, Chatty SDK, with the goal of keeping Haru in sync with dialog partners, judging their mood and supporting natural turn-taking without unnatural pauses and long wait-times for responses. This novel part of the Haru system is actively supported by CereProc Ltd., who offer support and additional functionality throughout the project. In this report, we discuss our progress in producing test harnesses, extending the existing Tiers of Friendship demo , evaluating current systems of rapid turn-taking in context, outline current work on incorporating backchannels into dialog, and discuss findings from our studies on human/human as well as human/robot dialog.