Session: signal processing of animal vocalisations/AI/robotics

  • Jennifer Cunha
  • Reiji Suzuki
  • Lisa Gill

Session: human communication/robotics

  • Maria Postma
  • Véronique Aubergé
  • David Cohen

Session: human-animal communication

  • Piera Filippi
  • Andrey Anikin
  • Kasia Pisanski

Invited Discussants

Andrey Anikin

My homepage is http://cogsci.se - publications, contact details, photo, etc. A brief description of research interests: “I am interested in how the voice can convey information over and above a linguistic code - for example, by using a rough voice quality, nonverbal vocalizations such as laughing and screaming, etc. I study these acoustic phenomena from a cognitive and biological perspective, with particular focus on sensory biases and auditory attention. The objective of this research is to shed light on the evolution of vocal communication and its universal features across human cultures and animal species.”

Véronique Aubergé

Véronique Aubergé is a CNRS researcher in human sciences at the LIG Lab (Computer Sciences Lab at Grenoble, France) where she heads the Domus Living Lab platform, and she is an associate Professor at the University of Grenoble-Alpes (UGA) where she directs I3L department. She heads the Chair Robo’Ethics at Grenoble National Polytechnics Institute. She has a PhD in Language Sciences and in Computer Sciences. She was a research engineer at the French Company OROS, and a researcher at ICP Lab and then at GIPSA Lab until 2012, where she developed cognitive models, experiments and applications in phonetics, prosody and expressive text-to speech synthesis. At LIG Lab, she focuses on social robotics as instruments to observe and to design models on the human interactional behaviors. She develops co-construction methods for experimenting in Living Lab some real life socio-damaged situations (elderly, children at hospital), for which the robot could be a transitory aid in ethical issues. In particular she is implied in the LIG robotic Social-Touch-RobAir platform developed within the LIG fablab, and in Emox (Awabot Inc) and Diya One (Partnering Robotics Inc.) robots.

David Cohen

David Cohen is Professor at Sorbonne University and head of the department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. He is also member of the lab Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotiques - ISIR (CNRS UMR 7222). His group runs research programs in the field of autism spectrum disorder and learning disabilities, childhood onset schizophrenia, catatonia and severe mood disorder. He supports a developmental and plastic view of child psychopathology, at the level of both understanding and treatment. As a member of ISIR, he is collaborating within the team Perception, Interaction and Social Robotics (see http://speapsl.aphp.fr). He was President of the IACAPAP 2012 congress. He is also Corresponding Member of the French National Academy of Medicine.

Jennifer Cunha

Jennifer Cunha is an attorney, animal cognition trainer, writer, and international speaker, focusing on animal literacy and communication. She’s been featured in Bird Talk magazine, has twice written articles for the International Association of Applied Behavior Consultants Journal and is a frequent lecturer at science conventions and companion bird gatherings around the world. Jennifer collaborates on animal literacy and communication projects with university researchers and her research has been published in peer-reviewed scientific proceedings. Jennifer is co-owner of Parrot Kindergarten, Inc., a company focusing on enhanced enrichment and communication training for parrot caregivers. https://parrotkindergarten.com/research

Piera Filippi

I’m currently a postdoc at the University of Zurich. My research explores the biological roots of human language in animal vocal communication, with a special focus on emotional voice intonation. To do so, I combine work in philosophy of language, biology and psycholinguistics within a unified frame of study. Website:

Lisa Gill

I am interested in animal communication, its sensory and evolutionary underpinnings, and the diverse disruptions it faces through human influences (anthropogenic noise and urbanisation). I am currently working on the Dawn Chorus project which aims to bring together academic science, citizen science and arts, to explore new ways for acoustic biodiversity monitoring, as well as for education, outreach, and building awareness for nature. https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=Uz68DKEAAAAJ&hl=en

Katarzyna (Kasia) Pisanski

Katarzyna (Kasia) Pisanski is a permanent CNRS researcher (National Centre for Scientific Research) affiliated with the University of Lyon, France, and working in collaboration with the University of Wrocław, Poland. Having obtained her PhD in 2014 from McMaster University, Canada, she now leads a successful research program on human and animal behaviour with a focus on acoustic communication. Kasia employs a multidisciplinary comparative and experimental approach to study the origins, ontogeny, development, mechanisms, and evolved social functions of nonverbal voice production and perception across human cultures and mammalian species.

Reiji Suzuki

Reiji Suzuki is Associate Professor at the Department of Complex Systems Science, Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan. He is investigating interactions between evolutionary and ecological processes (eco-evo-devo) using artificial life approaches such as agent-based models and artificial creatures. Recently, he is also interested in understanding acoustic interactions among songbirds as complex systems (e.g., temporal sound space partitioning based on acoustic niche hypothesis), and applying robot audition techniques (an integrated open-source framework for sound source localization, separation and classification in real-time, called HARK) to better observation of their spatial-spectral-temporal patterns in field conditions. He is a member of International Society of Artificial Life. Website URL: http://www.alife.cs.is.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~reiji/ Website URL for birdsong related works: https://sites.google.com/view/alcore-suzuki/home/songbirds