Full Paper at TSD 2020

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23rd International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue

Paper “Synthesising Expressive Speech – Which Synthesiser for VOCAs?” has been accepted for publication at the 23rd International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue” in Brno, Czech Republic, Sep. 2020 :-)

[ Conference, TSD 2020, Brno, Czech Republic ]
[ DOI ]
[ Springer ]
[ Program ]

Jan-Oliver Wuelfing, Chi Tai Dang, Elisabeth André, Synthesising Expressive
Speech - Which Synthesiser for VOCAs?, TSD 2020, Proceedings of the 23rd 
International Conference  on Text, Speech and Dialogue (TSD 2020)
(Brno, Czech Republic). Springer

In the context of people with complex communication needs who depend on Voice Output Communication Aids, the ability of speech synthesisers to convey not only sentences, but also emotions would be a great enrichment. The latter is essential and very natural in interpersonal speech communication. Hence, we are interested in the expressiveness of speech synthesisers and their perception. We present the results of a study in which 82 participants listened to different synthesised sentences with different emotional contours from three synthesisers…

Full Paper at AmI 2019

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The 2019 European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI 2019)

Paper “Indoor Air Quality and Wellbeing – Enabling Awareness and Sensitivity with Ambient IoT Displays” has been accepted for publication at the The 2019 European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI 2019)” in Rome, Italy, Nov. 2019 :-)

[ DOI ]
[ PDF ]
[ Conference, AmI 2019, Rome, Italy ]
[ Program ]

Andreas Seiderer, Ilhan Aslan, Chi Tai Dang, Elisabeth André, Indoor Air Quality 
and Wellbeing - Enabling Awareness and Sensitivity with Ambient IoT Displays, 
AmI 2019, Proceedings of the The 2019 European Conference on Ambient 
Intelligence (AmI 2019) (Rome, Italy). Springer

The quality of indoor air exerts influence on the wellbeing of people. However, people rarely notice a constant and creeping deterioration of indoor air. Especially in enclosed places where several people get together, like meeting rooms, school rooms and public transportation, bad air quality might cause a reduction of cognitive performance, increased headache, fatigue and sleepiness. This paper describes and discusses a privacy respecting system, built with low cost IoT components and open-source software, that …

Environs Release 0.9.9.3

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Today we’re releasing Environs version 0.9.9.3 with some bug fixes.

  • Updated: Debug exception handling
  • Added: Limit Mediator max sendqueue items to 6000
  • Updated: Disposal of DeviceBase.UdpListener
  • Fixed: Crash in native layer due to (race condition in) device management list item access through DeviceBase
  • Added: string class to Tracer for debugging

Have a look at the CHANGELOG.md for an exhaustive list of changes.

Environs 0.9.0

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With the release of version 0.9.0, Environs underwent major changes which provide:

  • Change static API to object API which allows multiple instances of Environs objects to manage multiple application areas as the same time
  • CPP API which provides an object oriented interface for pure c++ projects (requires c++11)
  • Provide support and solutions for Visual Studio 2015
  • There are much more features and changes under the hood. However, as long as you made use of the Object API, there’s no need to update the code further.
  • With release 0.9.0, the RAW API of Environs got a new parameter to indicate a particular instance. The implementation of the Object API shows how to obtain and maintain instance handles.

The CPP API provides interface objects and enables the use of different c-runtimes at client code and framework code. This feature makes use of c++11 smart pointers to maintain memory allocation and disposal “at the right runtime side”.

We provide two simple examples (WindowsWin32, ChatApp.CPP) for the Windows platform which show how to use Environs from pure c++ client code. You may statically link against the framework library or use the object loader provided in Environs.Loader.cpp. The latter dynamically loads the framework library at runtime, creates an Environs object, and returns a smart pointer to the object interface. Client code therefore does not need to care about releasing memory or resources allocated for the object. Both features also provide the benefit that client code may use an arbitrary c-runtime (CRT) without having to care about the c-runtime of the framework library.

For iOS and OSX platforms, you may choose between the Objective-C or the CPP API. In order to show this, we provided CPP API examples in addition to the Objective-C examples in the iOSX folder.

The Objective-C API is actually a thin wrapper around the CPP API and connects the ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) of iOS/OSX projects with the object lifecycle management of the CPP API.

The tutorials and documentation will be updated soon to reflect the API changes.

Hello Madeira

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Up to now, Environs has been made public (hcm-lab.de/environs) and open source (hcm-lab.de/git/environs/environs) and the most important concepts as well as design rationales have been published in the proceedings of the EICS conference in 2014.

Potential usage examples have been presented and discussed, e.g. in the domain of Internet of Things (ITS 2014, Dresden) or collaborative visualization of energy consumptions (INTERACT 2015, Bamberg).

In order to further promote Environs and discuss the applicability of the concepts behind, the Environs framework has been submitted and (fortunately) accepted for discussion in workshops at the Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces conference in Madeira, Portugal, 14.th – 18.th November 2015.

–> Interact 2015 conference
–> Cross-Surface: Workshop on Interacting with Multi-Device Ecologies in the Wild
—-> A Framework Towards Challenges and Issues of Multi-Surface Environments
–> Shared Infrastructures for Tangible Tabletops & Interactive Surfaces