VARNI , Giovanna

This research is concerned with synchronization (or entrainment), and in particular on emotional synchronization, which is likely to be an important driver of collaborative processes. We focus on ensemble musical performance, an ideal test-bed for the development of models and techniques for measuring creative social interaction in an...

Embodied cooperation arises when two co-present, individuals in motion coordinate their goal-directed actions". The adoption of the embodied cooperation paradigm for the development of embodied and social multimedia systems opens new perspectives for future User Centric Media. Systems for embodied music listening, which enable users to...

Endowing search engines with multimodal content indexing, sharing, and retrieval is a research challenge for the ICT community. This paper introduces a use case exploiting embodied cooperation as a paradigm for formulating social queries. It focuses on the assessment of the experience of users to this use case and on the design and exploitation...

This paper presents a multimodal system for real-time analysis of nonverbal affective social interaction in small groups of users. The focus is on two major aspects of affective social interaction: the synchronization of the affective behavior within a small group and the emergence of functional roles, such as leadership. A small group of users...

Social interaction and embodiment are key issues for future User Centric Media. Social networks and games are more and more characterized by an active, physical participation of the users. The integration in mobile devices of a growing number of sensors to capture users' physical activity (e.g., accelerometers, cameras) and context information...

Embodiment and reflexive interaction proved to be effective approaches to music education in childhood. A research challenge consists of merging them. This paper presents BeSound, an application intended to support children in learning the basic elements of composition. Children explore rhythm, melody, and harmony by playing at mimicking...

Research on analysis of expressive music performance is recently moving its focus from a single player to small music ensembles, extending the analysis to the social interaction among the members of the ensemble. A step in this direction is the definition and the validation of a set of scoreindependent audio features that enable to characterize...

We discuss the use of dynamic auditory patterns to detect and control human action. We argue that such patterns can affect the ability of standing persons to control medio-lateral orientation of their body. Subjects (N = 10) stood a mechanical platform that could rotate in the subject's medio-lateral axis. Real-time data about platform roll...

In this paper, we investigate the detection of laughter from the user's nonverbal full-body movement in social and ecological contexts. Eight hundred and one laughter and nonlaughter segments of full-body movement were examined from a corpus of motion capture data of subjects participating in social activities that stimulated laughter. A set of...

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Despite its relevance for human-human communication, laughter has been quite under-investigated and under-exploited in human-machine interaction. Nevertheless, endowing machines with the capability of analyzing laughter (i.e., to detect when the user is laughing, to measure intensity of laughter, to distinguish between different laughter styles...

In this paper we describe the SAME networked platform for context-aware, experience-centric mobile music applications, and we present an implementation of the SAME active music listening paradigm: the Mobile Conductor. It allows the user to express herself in conducting a virtual ensemble playing a MIDI piece of music by means of her mobile...

The embodied and reflexive interaction paradigms separately proved to be eective for learning music in childhood. However, nowadays, there is a scarcity of research addressing the joined adoption of these paradigms, both from a theoretical and a technological point of view. BeSound supports children to explore - by means of their own body -...

Questo articolo presenta una panoramica del lavoro di ricerca sull'analisi dell'espressività del gesto e del movimento umano nell'interazione uomo-macchina presso il Laboratorio di Informatica Musicale (InfoMus Lab) del DIST (Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Telematica) dell'Università di Genova. Un'attenzione particolare è dedicata...

Despite recent advancements in our understanding of the human perception of the emotional behaviour of embodied artificial entities in virtual reality environments, little remains known about various specifics relating to the effect of gender mapping on the perception of emotion from body movement. In this paper, a pilot experiment is presented...

The EU-ICT FET Project ILHAIRE is aimed at endowing machines with automated detection, analysis, and synthesis of laughter. This paper describes the Body Laughter Index (BLI) for automated detection of laughter starting from the analysis of body movement captured by a video source. The BLI algorithm is described, and the index is computed on a...

The aim of the Multimodal and Multiperson Corpus of Laughter in Interaction (MMLI) was to collect multimodal data of laughter with the focus on full body movements and different laughter types. It contains both induced and interactive laughs from human triads. In total we collected 500 laugh episodes of 16 participants. The data consists of 3D...