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We present MeetDot, a videoconferencing system with live translation captions overlaid on screen. The system aims to facilitate conversation between people who speak different languages, thereby reducing communication barriers between…
Animating an avatar that reflects a user's action in the VR world enables natural interactions with the virtual environment. It has the potential to allow remote users to communicate and collaborate in a way as if they met in person.…
Vision-language models (VLMs) have excelled in multimodal tasks, but adapting them to embodied decision-making in open-world environments presents challenges. One critical issue is bridging the gap between discrete entities in low-level…
Audio-driven talking video generation has advanced significantly, but existing methods often depend on video-to-video translation techniques and traditional generative networks like GANs and they typically generate taking heads and…
In the context of avatar-mediated communication, it is crucial for the face-to-face interlocutor to sense the operator's presence and emotions via the avatar. Although androids resembling humans have been developed to convey presence…
Young people's mental well-being is a global concern, with peer support playing a key role in daily emotional regulation. Conversational agents are increasingly viewed as promising tools for delivering accessible, personalised peer support,…
Recent pose-transfer methods aim to generate temporally consistent and fully controllable videos of human action where the motion from a reference video is reenacted by a new identity. We evaluate three state-of-the-art pose-transfer…
Avatar embodiment experiences have the potential to enhance human capabilities by extending human senses, body, and mind. This study investigates social acceptance of robotic and virtual avatars as enablers of capability enhancement in six…
Active speaker detection in videos addresses associating a source face, visible in the video frames, with the underlying speech in the audio modality. The two primary sources of information to derive such a speech-face relationship are i)…
VR telepresence consists of interacting with another human in a virtual space represented by an avatar. Today most avatars are cartoon-like, but soon the technology will allow video-realistic ones. This paper aims in this direction and…
Animating and simulating crowds using an agent-based approach is a well-established area where every agent in the crowd is individually controlled such that global human-like behaviour emerges. We observe that human navigation and movement…
Recent advances in foundation models have enabled conversational agents that aim for sustained companionship rather than mere task completion. Yet most still remain unable to support natural, long-term companion-like interactions, resulting…
Building computer systems that can converse about their visual environment is one of the oldest concerns of research in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics (see, for example, Winograd's 1972 SHRDLU system). Only recently,…
In order to enhance levels of engagement with conversational systems, our long term research goal seeks to monitor the confusion state of a user and adapt dialogue policies in response to such user confusion states. To this end, in this…
In video conferencing, human faces serve as the primary visual focal points, playing multifaceted roles that enhance visual communication and emotional connection. However, we argue that a human face is also a side channel, which can…
Although neural rendering has made significant advances in creating lifelike, animatable full-body and head avatars, incorporating detailed expressions into full-body avatars remains largely unexplored. We present DEGAS, the first 3D…
Human language learners are exposed to a trickle of informative, context-sensitive language, but a flood of raw sensory data. Through both social language use and internal processes of rehearsal and practice, language learners are able to…
Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, while integral to the evolving digital ecosystem, present a critical challenge: the occlusion of users' eyes and portions of their faces, which hinders visual communication and may contribute to social…
Dynamic facial emotion is essential for believable AI-generated avatars, yet most systems remain visually static, limiting their use in simulations like virtual training for investigative interviews with abused children. We present a…
Talking face generation has gained significant attention as a core application of generative models. To enhance the expressiveness and realism of synthesized videos, emotion editing in talking face video plays a crucial role. However,…