Supervisor:

S. Ultes

Description:

As words and their semantics are not the only information held by human speech, research moved its focus towards emotion recognition. Various approaches for offline emotion recognition exist by now. Based on this work, an online emotion recognizing unit has to be implemented and tested.

(1 Person)

• Good JAVA Programming Skills
• Interest in Machine Learning 

Supervisor:

T. Gasanova

Description:

Clustering algorithms have a lot of important applications in real life. There are different approaches having their own advantages and disadvantages. The task of this work is to test the performance of the chosen algorithm varying its parameters on different datasets.

The algorithms to chose from:

• Artificial neural networks
• Non-parametric models
• Genetic algorithm
• Classical approaches (Hierarchical clustering, k-means, etc.)

(4 Persons)

• Good Programming Skills in C++

Supervisor:

S. Sopov

Description:

Multiobjective genetic programming is a new and perspective approach for the intellectual analysis in modeling and developing of dialogue systems. Now you can participate in improvement of this approach. The following themes are suggested:

1) To develop the universal multiobjective algorithm with any number of criteria.

2) To develop the universal genetic programming algorithm with the possibility of using any kind of the functional and term sets.

(2 Persons)

• to be ready to solve difficult but interesting problems;
• programming skills in any OOP language;
• basic knowledge in the module programming;
• project result should be implemented as a dll-module with corresponding manuals.

Supervisor:

S. Ultes

Description:

Probably the only research dialogue systems applied in real life is the Let's Go system of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. People can call the system to get information about public transportation. The task of this work is to analyze the system descriptions and to adapt the dialogue for the ontology-based OwlSpeak dialogue manager.

(1 Person)

• Good JAVA Programming Skills
• Good Programming Skills in a Scripting Language, e.g. Perl
• Interest in Dialogue Systems

Supervisor:

A. Schmitt

Description:

The task of this project is the implementation of new features for our Eclips-RCP-based Java workbench that allows for a detailed analysis of logged dialogue conversations. Furthermore, the current project is to be enhanced in such a way that it can be made publically available on an open-source platform.

(1 Person)

Requirements:

Strong Java programming skills, interest in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems, interest in Machine Learning

Supervisor:

G. Bertrand

Description:

Adapting dialogues to user emotions, profile and the current situation is a complex task, which is needed to create a more human-like dialogue system. For testing how to adapt dialogues in an appropriate way, we want to do Wizard-of-Oz Experiments (Experiments where parts of the system are simulated by a human person). In order to be able to conduct Wizard-of-Oz experiments, we need a framework, where the wizard (human person) who simulates the system part, can choose which dialogue fragment is appropriate for the user. In this Bachelor Thesis the student can design a database which provides different dialogue acts for coping with different situations in user interaction. Different ways of interacting with the user via speech should be designed and implemented in a database which will be the foundation of a Wizard-of-Oz system.

(1 Person)

Requirements:

Interest in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems, basic knowledge in database programming

Supervisor:

G. Bertrand

Description:

Adapting dialogues to user emotions, profile and the current situation is a complex task, which is needed to create a more human-like dialogue system. For testing how to adapt dialogues in an appropriate way, we want to do Wizard-of-Oz Experiments (Experiments where parts of the system are simulated by a human person). In order to be able to conduct Wizard-of-Oz experiments, we need a framework, where the wizard (human person) who simulates the system part, can choose which dialogue fragment is appropriate for the user. In this Bachelor Thesis the student has the opportunity to create a servlet using state-of-the-art servlet technologies which is able to receive queries for adaptive dialogue acts. The servlet must have access to a database which contains dialogue fragments for creating different dialogue strategies. The servlet presents the information from the database in an xml-conform file format so that the client can interpret the information.

(1 Person)

Requirements:

Basic knowledge in web technologies, programming skills in Java, familiarity with XML technologies

Supervisor:

F. Nothdurft

Description:

Adapting dialogues to user emotions, profile and the current situation is a complex task, which is needed to create a more human-like dialogue system. For testing how to adapt dialogues in an appropriate way, we want to do Wizard-of-Oz Experiments (Experiments where parts of the system are simulated by a human person). In order to be able to conduct Wizard-of-Oz experiments, we need a framework, where the wizard (human person) who simulates the system part, can choose which dialogue fragment is appropriate for the user. In this Bachelor Thesis the student has to design an User Interface for the Wizard. The User Interface should communicate to the server side, where the dialogue fragments which are stored in a database, and create the system utterance, which is presented via speech to the user. The User Interface should be able to let the wizard choose the system utterance according to emotional, situational states and the user profile.

(1 Person)

Requirements:

Interest in Spoken Language Dialogue Systems, basic knowledge in client-server-communication, programming skills in User Interfaces and XML-Technologies

Supervisor:

H. Lang

Description:

Java Server Pages (JSR-245) allow the integration of java code into html documents. A set of those server pages along with a number of additional java classes make up a Portlet (JSR-168). Usually the jsp files belonging to a Portlet are referenced from within compiled java classes. Hence there is no explicit mapping between a Portlet and its associated jsp files. Since such a mapping is indispensable for an avatar based help system currently developed within the scope of the bwGRiD portal project, a way to implement a Portlet to jsp file mapping has to be devised and integrated into the existing portal framework.

(1 Person)

Requirements:

Profound knowledge of Java, interest in J2EE web applications, basic knowledge of web standards and XML

Supervisor:

H. Hüning

Description:

The focus work will be the generation of test cases from the model-based specification for user interfaces in cars. The functionality of the user interfaces is increasing rapidly, so the time for writing correct specifications is critical. In order to be able to validate the specifications, we investigate the model-based format of UML 2.0 state charts. We develop tools for a simulation from these state charts, including the behaviour of screen elements.

(1 Person)

Requirements:

Background in computer science, engineering or similar, Programming skills (C++, Java, ActionScript, …), Strong interest in model-based specification and testing of user interfaces, Analytic skills and ability to work single-handedly

Supervisor:

H. Hüning

Description:

The team "HMI Implementation" at Daimler in Ulm, located next to the University of Ulm, is working on model-based specification methods and testing of user interfaces, or human-machine interfaces (HMI). The user interfaces are for the so-called head-units in Mercedes passenger cars, which integrate infotainment applications such as audio, telephone and navigation. The user interfaces typically comprise a screen, multi-functional buttons, and in some cases speech dialogues (i.e. multi-modal user interfaces). At Daimler, specifications of the user interfaces need to be written, and head-unit devices from suppliers need to be tested for conformance to the specifications. We develop tools for model-based testing of the user interfaces, so both the specification and test models can be derived from a system model. A test case is a particular path through a UML state chart. The aims of testing are twofold, first to check the model, and second to compare the behaviour of the model to the head-unit implementation. Tools for model based testing are either extensions of a UML tool like Enterprise Architect or combinations of tools like EB Guide and Conformiq (see URLs below). Such tools will be provided to the student, or, as a fallback possibility, we have our own source code for automatic test case generation from UML state charts. The focus of this bachelor thesis is planned to be the correct design of test models, such that test cases can be generated automatically. Either, another student will work on automatic test generation in parallel, or this thesis may comprise more aspects of automatic test generation. Challenges of this work will be: A systematic way to deal with different goals of testing, definition of formats for all necessary elements in the test models, validation of the results, and study of literature on model-based testing of user interfaces.

(1 Person)

1. For an overview of model-based testing and test case generation see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-based_testing
2. For a UML tool enterprise architect see http://sparxsystems.eu/
3. For the EB Guide example see http://www.elektrobit.com/what_we_deliver/automotive_software/products/eb_guide_-_hmi_development
4. Conformiq http://www.verifysoft.com/en_conformiq_automatic_test_generation.html

Supervisor:

G. Bertrand

Description:

This work is concerned with a displaying adaptive dialogue acts (parts of a spoken human machine dialogue) in 3D. That means to transform parts of an adaptive dialogue model (XML-Format) into a corresponding 3D Coordinate representation. For this purpose the student may take advantage of jzy3d or any other 3D library he/she finds appropriate.

(1 Person)

Supervisor:

S. Ultes

Description:

Speech not only contains of spoken words bud holds more information about the speaker. In this task, a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) should be used to find out if a speaker is drunk or sober. For that, a suitable feature set based on Automatic Speech Recognition has to be found and the topology of the HMM has to be designed.

(1 Person)

Description:

The main objective is the development of an affective grammar that is able to determine a user’s emotional state by spotting “emotion words” within utterances. The grammar should be written in theW3C grxml format to be included in a VoiceXML-based dialogue system. Optionally, speech-signal based emotion recognition shall be investigated. The recognizer output shall be integrated in a dialogue system which optionally shall be evaluated in user tests.

(1 Person)

Requirements:

Programming skills (Java), interest in model-based specification and development of user interfaces

Description:

The objective is the implementation of Symbian C++ client for distributed spoken language information retrieval system. The focus of the work should be placed on the development of the front-end for Distributed Speech Recognition (DSR) systems. The front-end extracts characteristic features out of speech signal, sends them to the DSR server, gets the recognized utterance back and presents the result in appropriate form to the user.

(1 Person)

Description:

Speech recognition is becoming a standard interface in the human-machine communication. However, the performance of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is highly affected by the mismatch in training and testing data. The differences in the vocal tract of speakers, articulation, microphone transfer function, etc. lead to performance degradation. The study of adaptation and normalization techniques to increase the reliability of an ASR-system and further implementation of these algorithms constitute the main objective of this work.

(1 Person)

Description:

The main objective is to improve the unsupervised categorization of speech utterances by analysing new metrics for capturing similarities (or distances) between the utterances. Since components of speech utterances are the words, the purpose is to carry the mentioned analysis to the word level, i.e. search for new formulations that provide the semantic affinities between different words. If the semantic similarity among words is appropriately captured, it can be used to estimate the similarities between utterances whose component words are not identical.

(1 Person)

Description:

This work deals with dialogue modelling for a multi-party spoken language dialogue system. Each user utterance is integrated in the dialogue model as a new dialogue state with information such as the semantic content, a dialogue act, speaker and addressee. The system then decides upon this dialogue state how to further proceed in the dialogue using update rules. These rules would e.g. provoke that the information
is stored in a so-called task model which describes the constraints for the database queries. Task model and update rules have to be developed and implemented.

(1 Person)