MIL Speech Seminars 2003-2004

The MIL seminar series schedule for the Long Vacation 2003 was as follows:

27th June 2003	Jason Williams (MIL)	Using Wizard-of-Oz simulations to bootstrap Reinforcement-Learning-based dialog management systems	This seminar describes a method for "boot-strapping" a Reinforcement Learning-based dialog manager using a Wizard-of-Oz trial. The state space and action set are discovered through the annotation, and an initial policy is generated using a Supervised Learning algorithm. The method is tested and shown to create an initial policy which performs significantly better and with less effort than a hand-crafted policy, and can be generated using a small number of dialogs.
2nd July 2003	Bob MacDonald (AMA, Canada)	Brainwave Mediated Human-Computer Interaction - The Claire Project	The Claire Project is an ambitious interdisciplinary research programme based at the University of Victoria (Canada) which seeks to develop techniques for human-computer interaction that involve brainwave signals. During the seminar, an overview of the project will be given with specific emphasis on the main processing stages that convert standard EEG output into commands that enable a human user to interact with a computer using only brainwave signals. These stages include the digitization process, the feature extraction process, the feature translator process, the control interface and, ultimately, the graphical user interface. Although at present the technologies developed as part of The Claire Project essentially constitute part of the growing `rehabilitation engineering' field, which seeks to provide some kind of autonomy for people with physical disibilities, the potential applications are considerable, and the techniques currently being explored could drastically alter the current human-computer interaction paradigm.