Hosted by Metz Supélec Campus, the eNTERFACE summer workshop brings together researchers and students around the creation of prototype human-machine interfaces. We meet Olivier Pietquin, teaching researcher and event organiser.

Teaching Researcher at Metz Supélec Campus, Olivier Pietquin leads the Machine Learning and Interactive Systems research group (MaLIS). His particular research interests are learning using interactive system feedback.

Eurêka.Lorraine: What does the organising of this event mean for Metz Campus ?
Olivier Pietquin : For Supélec, what this summer workshop means first and foremost is international visibility: eNTERFACE 2012 will welcome 72 researchers from 12 countries. The French system of Schools of Engineers is still little known outside of France. This event will enable us to increase awareness of us as a place of research and of excellence, in the minds of a public which associates French research exclusively with universities and with the CNRS (National Scientific Research Centre). eNTERFACE 2012 will also be key in setting up European consortia and consolidating our networks on an international scale. Did SmartRoom play a part in the choice of Lorraine ?
There were several candidates for this edition of eNTERFACE, Lisbon being a prominent one. SmartRoom did play an important part in the selection committee's choice. Its robotics platform will also be made available for the "Nao robot" project (the development of multimodal interfaces for human-robot dialogue and for "ArmBand" (controlling a robot arm using a brain-machine interface). The SmartRoom sensing network, cameras and microphones will be used by the team responsible for the "Human motion recognition" project. Its objective is to recognise social activities, human activities involving a group, using images and sound. It boils down to succeeding in recognising that such and such a scene corresponds to a conversation, or that in some other scene the participants are playing... What project will you be working on during this workshop ?
I am involved in the FET OPEN ILHAIRE project. The FET (Future and Emerging Technologies Open Scheme) is a European programme financing fundamental research. An extremely selective programme, there was only a 6% acceptance rate when we submitted our project. ILHAIRE (Incorporating Laughter into Human Avatar Interactions) has the objective of studying the influence of laughter in human-machine interaction. Laughter is an enduring feature of human relationships. It shows interest in a conversation, it has a social function, psychological dimensions, and so on. If laughter has not been studied much in human-human interaction, it has been studied even less when it comes to human-machine interaction. What makes the ILHAIRE project original is that it assembles a multi-disciplinary team of psychologists, engineers and IT specialists in order to cover every aspect of this matter. What are your main lines of work ?
Engineers and IT specialists face three major problems. The first one is managing to detect and characterise laughter in human audible and visual production. The second challenge is synthesising natural laughter by a machine. Unlike speech, which uses 37 different phonemes (in French), laughter uses every single sound that the larynx is capable of producing. The third problem is deciding when to laugh and what sort of laugh to produce. ILHAIRE started in September 2011 and will continue until September 2014. The University of Mons is leading on this project, which incorporates 8 European laboratories and one French SME specialising in avatar production.

• eNTERFACE 2012
• www.ilhaire.eu
• FP7 FET OPEN
• Olivier PIETQUIN (Supélec)
• MaLIS - Machine Learning and Interactive Systems