Hello, dear reader. Did you know there is an interesting gesture conference going on at the moment? Or are you in fact reading this blog from the very ‘plenarsaal’ in Bielefeld’s ZiF, this year’s home of the Gesture Workshop (for previous occasions of the workshop, see here), where I am typing this blog entry? It could be, because all around me I see people who are interested in gesture and sign language using their laptops while the discussions are going on.

It’s quite a stimulating little workshop 🙂

At the moment Kirsten Bergman is taking questions from Jan Peter de Ruiter and Asli Özyürek about how she and her colleague Stefan Kopp implemented their theories about gesture and speech into an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). De Ruiter just complimented her with the ‘best model of gesture production he has seen so far’, and it is indeed quite an impressive and comprehensive treatment of gesture and speech synthesis.

Time for a coffee now, but I will be posting some entries in the coming days about the conference, highlighting stuff that I find to be particularly interesting. If you couldn’t make it but are interested then check back regularly to get a bit of the flavor of the workshop.