How do we move our head in speech?

In human conversation information is communicated not only by speech but also by non-verbal signals such as facial gestures and body movements. Also virtual agents, that is computer-animated talking heads, or human avatars, benefit from an ability to use non-verbal signals, provided they are performed in a natural, realistic manner. There are non-verbal signals of different kinds, however. There are conscious signals, emblems, with definite meaning, such as head nods as indicators of agreement, and there are illustrators that rather accompany and augment the speech signal. An example of the latter kind is focal accents that are assumed to be accompanied by larger head movements. In her thesis “Head Movement Correlates to Focal Assignment in Swedish”, Sonia Sangari has studied this relation in depth. As one of the first studies of its kind, it includes spontaneous speech, in addition to laboratory speech. In particular, Sangari has investigated whether head movements are obligatory in conjunction with focal accents and exactly where, in the focused word, the head movement reaches its extreme value.
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Most influential paper

The Most Influential Paper Honorable Mention at the 2011 IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference has been given to the work by Pär Carlshamre, Kristian Sandahl and Mikael Lindvall at IDA together with two researchers from Lund University, Björn Regnell and Johan Natt och Dag. The paper, "An Industrial Survey of Requirements Interdependencies in Software Product Release Planning" was originally presented at the 5th IEEE Int. Symposium on Requirements Engineering 2001.
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"Making a Difference" GIS prize

Daniel Eriksson who studied the Systems Science (SVP) program at LiU, and currently leads the information management department at the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, was granted the annual "Make a Difference" prize at the company ESRI's annual user conference held in San Diego, California. With 16000 participants this is the largest conference for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the world. The conference has as one its highlights the prize ceremony for those who have done pioneering work within GIS.

The prize was handed out by the founder of the company Jack Dangermond. Jack's motivation for Daniel's winning the prize was the tool that Daniel's group have developed in order to collect and analyse information on land mines, cluster weapons, and other explosive remnants of war.

Daniel took part in the first board of the SVP student association (SAKS) and was responsible for information management.
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Integrated methods for development of adaptive embedded control systems

Computer systems are embedded in several products that we use on a daily basis. In many cases, these systems have the dedicated purpose of controlling one or several physical processes. The automotive domain is a prominent example of embedded control systems, with ABS, anti spin, and cruise control acting as a few examples of control applications.

Many embedded systems comprise several processing and control units that communicate sensor and actuators signals across a computer network. Execution in such distributed control systems leads to delays that affect the control quality delivered by the system. This thesis proposes methods for optimization of control quality in distributed systems with respect to the delays incurred by common scheduling policies and communication protocols. The proposed solutions integrate established techniques for synthesis, scheduling, and optimization of embedded computing system.

Modern embedded systems have to be able to react and adapt to several situations at run-time. Examples of such situations are changes in operational, the occurrence of faults in one or several components, and variations in the requested amount of resources. These requirements on adaptivity, as well as requirements on control quality, leads to several optimization problems for embedded systems. This thesis proposes solutions to these problems based on design and run-time solutions for decision making during execution.
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Case studies of AI-based decision support

Decision support systems have become increasingly important for decision makers as the amounts of information available increase and the time frames available for making decisions are being reduced at the same time. Users tend to regard intelligent systems as incomprehensible, fickle, or annoying, in particular in dynamic situations such as crisis management and military command. In a recent PhD at IDA Ola Leifler explains this resistance to intelligent decision support, and uses this explanation to formulate new design principles.
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Advances in Integrated Code Generation

A compiler back-end involves the solution of complex and hard optimization problems to generate fast and energy-efficient native code for a target processor, exploiting its architectural features with limited resources such as registers or execution units. Due to its high complexity, a code generator is commonly divided into several phases that each take care of one particular aspect at a time, such as instruction selection, instruction scheduling, or register allocation. However, these phases are usually interdependent; for instance, a decision in the instruction selection phase affects how an operation can be scheduled.

In a recent PhD thesis at IDA, Mattias Eriksson developed a fully integrated optimal code generator for loops and examined how phase separation affects target code quality.
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IDA-Ph.D.s awarded in Ph.D. thesis competition

In the semi-finals of TTTC's E.J. McCluskey Doctoral Thesis Competition at the European Test Symposium (Trondheim 24-26th May), research by Ph.D.s from IDA was awarded.

Dr. Viacheslav Izosimov was awarded on third place for the Ph.D. thesis "Scheduling and Optimization of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Embedded Systems". Viacheslav (a.k.a. Slava) worked towards his Ph.D. in SaS/ESLAB under the supervision of Professor Zebo Peng and Professor Petru Eles. Viacheslav is now working with EIS by Semcon.

Dr. Urban Ingelsson was awarded on first place for the Ph.D. thesis "Investigation into Voltage and Process Variation-Aware Manufacturing Test". Urban worked towards his Ph.D. at the University of Southampton, UK, under the supervision of Professor Bashir M. Al-Hashimi. Urban is now a post-doc in SaS/ESLAB working with Associate Professor Erik Larsson. Being awarded first place in the semi-finals means that Urban will take part in the final round of the competition which takes place in conjunction with the International Test Conference, in California (USA) in October.

For the competition Viacheslav and Urban held short presentations about their Ph.D. theses and also presented posters.

Dr. Viacheslav Izosimov's Ph.D. thesis:
http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:277144

Dr. Urban Ingelsson's Ph.D. thesis:
http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/67440/

Webpage for the contest:
http://www.tttc-events.org/tttc_website/index.php?section=awards_doctoral_thesis

European Test Symposium 2011:
http://www.iet.ntnu.no/workshop/ets2011/

International Test Conference 2011:
http://www.itctestweek.org/