Setting up the Interaction Lab
Oliver Lemon
SLTC Newsletter, February 2010
Setting up a new research group presents special challenges and opportunities. This article describes the work of the Interaction Lab, and some of the main issues we considered when setting up this new research facility.
The Interaction Lab
It's just over 3 months since our unique group of 5 postdoctoral
researchers moved to the School of Mathematics and Computer Science
(MACS) at Heriot Watt
University, Edinburgh, to set up a new research lab. The Interaction Lab was
created to focus on the data-driven development and evaluation of novel multimodal interfaces, using machine learning techniques to achieve increasing levels of adaptivity and robustness.
Setting up a new research lab is an exciting opportunity, which
presents a variety of challenges. Reflecting on our progress in the
past months, the most important stages in our development have been:
- Agreeing a shared mission statement and long-term vision for the ongoing activities of the lab
- Deciding on a practical and affordable voice platform for public data collections and system evaluations
- Securing sustainable funding streams for the lab's Research Fellows
- Agreeing a shared communication architecture and software infrastructure for the new multimodal systems we are developing
- Developing and advertising the lab website, and our availability for new research projects.
Regarding our vision and mission statement, it is important to develop shared goals about the long-term aspirations for our research, and especially to allow room for future growth and exploration of new research areas. A focus on computational models of "Interaction" is allowing us to develop from our core expertise in machine learning for data-driven multimodal interaction, into new explorations of statistical modelling in interactive systems more widely, for example in environmental and ecological modelling, robotics, and affective computing.
In terms of our hardware setup, we are developing the capacity to deploy speech interfaces to the general public. One of the current challenges in Spoken Dialogue System development is testing and gathering data in realistic environments with self-motivated users, rather than staged experiments in a lab with scripted scenarios. Addressing this is a key part of our strategy. We are setting up a facility to collect research data from real users, rather than in lab-based experiments, and to test our systems "in the wild". We will soon have the capability to handle multiple parallel calls from both standard phone and via VOIP. This is possible through a plug-in to our lab-based dialogue system that automatically generates VoiceXML on the fly. The pilot system will enable visitors during the popular Edinburgh Festival to use our dialogue systems to get information about places of interest in Edinburgh, such as restaurants.
A sustainable funding stream is obviously vital to provide continuity of our research and to develop our research environment. We currently have funded projects in the region of £1 million. These projects cover an exciting range of techniques and applications, for example combining vision and multitouch interaction for Technology Enhanced Learning, and applying statistical planning methods in spoken dialogue systems. This funding is a combination of European Commission FP7 (see the CLASSiC project), EPSRC, and ESRC projects (see the ECHOES project). We are also actively involved in new funding proposals, in particular targeting the European Commission's Cognitive Systems and Language Technologies calls. We collaborate with many other institutions and with industry -- for example Cambridge University, the Institute of Education (London), and France Telecom/Orange Labs.
Lab members
The Interaction Lab would not exist without its researchers. We have
brought together an excellent team of individuals, each with an
international research profile, with a
unique blend of complementary skills and experience:
- Paul Crook (machine learning, robotics)
- Mary Ellen Foster (multimodal interfaces, Natural Language Generation)
- Helen Hastie (spoken dialogue systems, speech processing, evaluation)
- Oliver Lemon (multimodal dialogue systems, machine learning, human-robot interaction)
- Xingkun Liu (spoken dialogue systems, systems integration)
Acknowledgements and more information
Thanks to the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) for the funding which created the Interaction Lab. We also thank the School of Mathematics and Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University for providing a nourishing, supportive, and stimulating modern research environment.
For more information, see:
- Recent Interaction Lab publications
- Research in Mathematics and Computer Science at Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh
- The Interaction Lab website
If you have comments, corrections, or additions to this article, please contact the author: Oliver Lemon, o.lemon [at] hw [dot] ac [dot] uk.
Oliver Lemon is leader of the Interaction Lab at Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh. His interests are in statistical learning approaches to multimodal interaction. Email: o.lemon@hw.ac.uk
Recent publications include:
- Oliver Lemon and Ioannis Konstas, "User Simulations for Context-sensitive Speech Recognition in Spoken Dialogue Systems", Proc. European Association for Computational Linguistics, 2009
- Matthew Frampton and Oliver Lemon, "Recent research advances in Reinforcement Learning in Spoken Dialogue Systems", Knowledge Engineering Review, 24(4): 375-408, 2009.
- Verena Rieser and Oliver Lemon, "Natural Language Generation as Planning under Uncertainty for Spoken Dialogue Systems", Proc. European Association for Computational Linguistics, 2009
- Verena Rieser and Oliver Lemon, "Does this list contain what you were searching for? Learning adaptive dialogue strategies for Interactive Question Answering", Journal of Natural Language Engineering, 15(1), 2008
- James Henderson, Oliver Lemon, and Kallirroi Georgila, "Hybrid Reinforcement / Supervised Learning of Dialogue Policies from Fixed Datasets", Computational Linguistics 34(4), 2008
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