The ARIA-VALUSPA team at Nottingham will also include a Research Associate/Programmer who will work on the project to translate your research outcome into actual modules to implement in the framework. You will be working in the School of Computer Science’s Computer Vision Lab (http://www.cvl.cs.nott.ac.uk/). Within this lab, you will be have the opportunity of collaborating with a  number of face-researchers: two lecturers (Michel Valstar and Yorgos Tzimiropoulos), four postdocs, and 7 PhD students. 

For your information, below is a short summary of the ARIA-VALUSPA project:

ARIA-VALUSPA will create a disruptive new framework that will allow easy creation of Affective Retrieval of Information Assistants (ARIA agents) that are capable of holding multi-modal social interactions in challenging and unexpected situations. The system can generate search queries and return the information requested by interacting with humans through virtual characters. These virtual humans will be able to sustain an interaction with a user for some time, and react appropriately to the user's verbal and non-verbal behaviour when presenting the requested information and refining search results.

The ARIA-VALUSPA project builds on the capacities of existing Virtual Humans developed by the consortium partners and/or made publicly available by other researchers, but will greatly enhance them. The assistants will be able to handle unexpected situations and environmental conditions, add self-adaptation, learning, European multilingual skills, and extended dialogue abilities to a multimodal dialogue system.  The framework to be developed will be suitable for multiple platforms, including desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The ARIAs will be able to be displayed and operate in a web browser.