A mix of posts on gesture, HCI, perception or robots and some personal information.
Tragic news reached me today through the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Piet Westendorp has passed away, much too soon, on november 19.
He was a great scholar, writer, and allround human being, who gave me and many other students a lot of support. He shared his great experience as willingly as his many views on [...]
Edward S. Klima was a linguist who, together with his wife Ursula Bellugi, wrote ‘The Signs of Language‘ (1979). He was one of the first scholars to pay serious attention to sign languages, ASL grammar in particular, and helped to get them recognized as proper languages. He died on Sept. 25 in the La Jolla [...]
Arend Harteveld died at the age of 50 years on Sunday 7 September 2008. Much too soon and entirely unexpected he was struck down by an accident in the blood circulation. Arend was a good man and a well respected colleague at Delft University of Technology. My thoughts go out to his family, especially to [...]
Today I received news that Washoe died at age 42. Washoe was a chimpansee that was taught sign language in order to study the extent to which she would be able to gain language skills.
An impression of Washoe talking with a researcher (source)
Here is more information on attempts to talk with chimps. May she [...]
Hero of the ‘once nearly lost art of pantomime’, Marcel Marceau (images), has recently died at the age of 84.
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A nice tribute (proceed to many others at YouTube at your leisure)
Mime Marceau was born as Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France. He died on September 22 this year. From what I gather of the many tributes [...]
A founding father of sign language research has died on August 17: Professor Bernard T. M. Tervoort. His 1953 dissertation at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) was titled ‘Structural analysis of visual language use in a group of deaf children’. It was groundbreaking, pioneering work in sign language research. He was the first to propose [...]
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