Projects

The amount of digital information is constantly increasing, and search engines are still the means for accessing this information. However, recommender systems are at their best way to become a remedy to this unsatisfying situation. Especially in m- and e-commerce recommender systems have already achieved a high level of attention and application. Unfortunately current recommender technology suffers from two major shortcomings. They require a huge amount of expertise and handcrafting for modelling an application domain, and they rely in their recommendations on the behaviour and opinions of those users active in the system. This is a poor resource compared to the abundance of opinions and ratings out there in the internet. With the project SEMPRE, we aim at developing semantic technology for exploiting the rich and dynamic resource of factual information and human opinions available on the internet.

The rapidly growing amount of music available in digital form via internet or digital libraries calls for entirely new computer-based methods for analysing, describing, distributing, and presenting music. The currently emerging research and application field known as Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a direct response to that need. Over the past years, our research group has accumulated substantial expertise in intelligent music processing. The goal of this project is to develop our know-how and methods further along three specific lines, to the point where they can be used as a basis for commercially relevant application projects.

The main objective of the MACS project was to explore and exploit the concept of affordances for the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robots acting goal-directedly in a dynamic environment. The claim was to develop affordance-based control as a method for robotics. Technically speaking, a prototypical affordance-based architecture has been developed and implemented on a mobile robot, KURT3D. For providing simple manipulation capabilities, KURT3D is equipped with a magnetic gripper crane arm. The experiments have been performed in the simulator MACSim and in a real demonstrator scenario .

In this research project the hypothesis was investigated if the attractivity of games could be increased by using emotional and/or partially "neurotically" acting agents. Two different personality agents were developed and integrated into games.

The aim of this project was to explore the prerequisites of such a personalised virtual butler: What is known about the needs of elder people, which results are provided by gerontopsychology and, especially, which methods of information and communication technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are already available or have to be developed further in which direction in order to realise such a virtual butler in the foreseeable future?

Aim of the MOSART project is to 'promote training-through-research, especially of young researchers, both pre- and post-doctoral level, within the frame of high quality trans-national collaborative research projects, including those in emerging fields of research'. MOSART promotes research in the field of Sound and Music Computing, focussing on machine analysis and understanding of musical aspects of sound, such as timbre space and control and virtualisation of instruments. Issues regarding the areas of Interactive Musical Performance and of Human Computer Interactive Conducting Tools are studied, with special attention being given to the use of computers in music analysis, digital music representation and computer assisted musical composition and performance.

Music (especially Western Classical Music) is a highly complex artifact that happens in real time; it is not easy for laypersons, music students, and even experts to always fully appreciate and understand the full structure and beauty of musical pieces and performances. The guiding vision of this project is to develop novel types of computer interfaces that provide new ways of presenting, teaching, understanding, experiencing, and also shaping music in creative ways.

Nowadays, there are a wide variety of techniques that can be used to generate and analyse sounds. However, urgent requirements (coming from the world of ubiquitous, mobile, pervasive technologies and mixed reality in general) trigger some fundamental yet unanswered questions.

The general goal of the Mind RACES project is to investigate different anticipatory cognitive mechanisms and architectures in order to build Cognitive Systems endowed with the ability to predict the outcome of their actions, to build a model of future events, to control their perception anticipating future stimuli and to emotionally react to possible future scenarios. Such Anticipatory Cognitive Systems will contribute to the successful implementation of the desired ambient intelligence.