This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the Second Workshop on Multimodal Analyses Enabling Artificial Agents in Human Interaction, MA3HMI 2014, held in Conjunction with INTERSPEECH 2014, in Singapore, Singapore, on September 14th, 2014. The 9 revised papers presented together with a keynote talk were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They are organized in two sections: human-machine interaction and dialogs and speech recognition.

Join trans-temporal adventuress Iris Wildthyme (Katy Manning) for a series of eight brand-new half-hour episodes as she travels through time and space aboard her trusty double-decker bus, accompanied by her new friend Captain Turner! 1. COMEBACK OF THE SCORCHIES by James Goss. 2. DARK SIDE by Nick Campbell. 3. ORACLE OF THE SUPERMARKET by Roy Gill. 4. MURDER AT THE ABBEY by Mark B. Oliver. 5. THE SLOTS OF GIZA by Hamish Steele. 6. HIGH SPIRITS by Cavan Scott. 7. AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL WEREWOLF IN BELGIUM by Scott Handcock. 8. LOOKING FOR A FRIEND by Paul Magrs. Katy Manning is a huge fan favourite from her time in Doctor Who starring as Jo Grant opposite the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee). She was recently to be seen on BBC1's Casualty series. Originally created by writer Paul Magrs, Iris Wildthyme has encountered most of the Doctor's classic incarnations across book and audio productions! David Warner is regarded as a legend of stage and screen, from one of the most regarded Hamlets of his time, to significant appearances in Star Trek, Doctor Who, and as the ultimate Evil in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits...C AST: Katy Manning (Iris Wildthyme), Geoffrey Breton (Captain Turner), Ian Hallard (Brian Bonamy/Inspector Greenock/Slot), Chris Rankin (Jack/Andy), Nicola Bryant (Maggie/Mabel), Lisa Bowerman (Joyce/Hilda), David Warner (Edward), Charlie Hayes (Cassie/Chloe), Toby Longworth (Rick/Mr Cane), Tracey Childs (Lady Fothergill/Nora), Stephen Fewell (Seth the Sensational/Tour Guide), Lizzie Hopley (Shelley),

This book presents a collection of papers from the Spring 1995 Work shop on Computational Approaches to Processing the Prosody of Spon taneous Speech, hosted by the ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Re search Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan. The workshop brought together lead ing researchers in the fields of speech and signal processing, electrical en gineering, psychology, and linguistics, to discuss aspects of spontaneous speech prosody and to suggest approaches to its computational analysis and modelling. The book is divided into four sections. Part I gives an overview and theoretical background to the nature of spontaneous speech, differentiating it from the lab-speech that has been the focus of so many earlier analyses. Part II focuses on the prosodic features of discourse and the structure of the spoken message, Part ilIon the generation and modelling of prosody for computer speech synthesis. Part IV discusses how prosodic information can be used in the context of automatic speech recognition. Each section of the book starts with an invited overview paper to situate the chapters in the context of current research. We feel that this collection of papers offers interesting insights into the scope and nature of the problems concerned with the computational analysis and modelling of real spontaneous speech, and expect that these works will not only form the basis of further developments in each field but also merge to form an integrated computational model of prosody for a better understanding of human processing of the complex interactions of the speech chain."

This volume brings together, through a peer-revision process, the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102: Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication, primarily discussed for the first time at the Second COST 2102 International Training School on "Development of Multimodal Int- faces: Active Listening and Synchrony" held in Dublin, Ireland, March 23-27 2009. The school was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Sci- tific and Technical Research, www.cost.esf.org ) in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the research activities developed within the COST Action 2102: "Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication" (cost2102.cs.stir.ac.uk) COST Action 2102 in its third year of life brought together about 60 European and 6 overseas scientific laboratories whose aim is to develop interactive dialogue systems and intelligent virtual avatars graphically embodied in a 2D and/or 3D interactive virtual world, capable of interacting intelligently with the environment, other avatars, and particularly with human users.

Embodied conversational agents (ECA) and speech-based human-machine interfaces can together represent more advanced and more natural human-machine interaction. Fusion of both topics is a challenging agenda in research and production spheres. The important goal of human-machine interfaces is to provide content or functionality in the form of a dialog resembling face-to-face conversations. All natural interfaces strive to exploit and use different communication strategies that provide additional meaning to the content, whether they are human-machine interfaces for controlling an application or different ECA-based human-machine interfaces directly simulating face-to-face conversation. Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction presents state-of-the-art concepts of advanced environment-independent multimodal human-machine interfaces that can be used in different contexts, ranging from simple multimodal web-browsers (for example, multimodal content reader) to more complex multimodal human-machine interfaces for ambient intelligent environments (such as supportive environments for elderly and agent-guided household environments). They can also be used in different computing environments-from pervasive computing to desktop environments. Within these concepts, the contributors discuss several communication strategies, used to provide different aspects of human-machine interaction.

Embodied conversational agents (ECA) and speech-based human-machine interfaces can together represent more advanced and more natural human-machine interaction. Fusion of both topics is a challenging agenda in research and production spheres. The important goal of human-machine interfaces is to provide content or functionality in the form of a dialog resembling face-to-face conversations. All natural interfaces strive to exploit and use different communication strategies that provide additional meaning to the content, whether they are human-machine interfaces for controlling an application or different ECA-based human-machine interfaces directly simulating face-to-face conversation. Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction presents state-of-the-art concepts of advanced environment-independent multimodal human-machine interfaces that can be used in different contexts, ranging from simple multimodal web-browsers (for example, multimodal content reader) to more complex multimodal human-machine interfaces for ambient intelligent environments (such as supportive environments for elderly and agent-guided household environments). They can also be used in different computing environments-from pervasive computing to desktop environments. Within these concepts, the contributors discuss several communication strategies, used to provide different aspects of human-machine interaction.