Information for Subjects
NUMACK Project
How important are gesture, eye gaze, posture, and other body movements in human communication? At the Articulab, we believe that understanding non-verbal communication, is essential for understanding how humans communicate with one another, and also essential for creating machines that can be equally effective communicators.
At the Articulab, we create computer-generated virtual beings, that we call Embodied Conversation Agents (ECAs).
One of our projects, NUMACK, is a virtual being who gives directions around Northwestern's Campus using a combination of speech, gestures and facial expressions, just like a human direction-giver. NUMACK interacts with human users, and in doing so helps us understand the relationship between speech, gesture and understanding in a variety of ways:
- Generating novel language and gestures �on-the-fly� using state-of-the-art computational models of language and a gesture planning systems.
- Expressing information about the real world from an internal knowledge base, while changing this knowledge based on the interaction with a human user.
- Using automatically synthesized speech while updating its body motions, or gestures, based on the movements of a human user.
In order to better understand the roles of speech, gesture and understanding among humans, and between humans and computers, we are looking for adults ages 18 and up to participate in experiments in our research lab.
Some participants will interact with other humans, giving directions and following directions. This allows us to understand and to model the human competencies on the basis of which we build our virtual humans. Other participants will interact with NUMACK, as it gives directions around the Northwestern University campus. In all cases, the sessions are recorded by several video cameras for later data analysis.
Our studies have been approved by a strict and thorough Institutional Review Board (I.R.B.) at Northwestern University, which is designed to protect the health and safety of all participants.
Although some people choose to participate several times, participation only requires a single visit and does not commit participants to future studies. Depending on the study, the experiment lasts 30-60 minutes. You may want to plan in a bit of extra time if you are interested in a more detailed explanation of the study.
Click here to schedule a study!
- Studies are scheduled for one hour, including detailed description of the research project.
- Participation is voluntary. There is no commitment and the study can be stopped at any time.
- Our studies are approved by the Northwestern I.R.B., a committee that is designed to protect all research subjects.
Location:
The ArticuLab is located in the Frances Searle Building on Northwestern University's Evanston campus. The Frances Searle Building is located four blocks east of the CTA Noyes El station. Click here for a campus map.
The Articulab at Northwestern University
Frances Searle Building
Room 2-147
2240 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Click here for driving directions. If you are arriving by CTA bus or train, we will provide tickets. Click here to plan your trip with CTA.
Parking Information:
Parking is available directly behind the Frances Searle Building. We will provide a pre-paid parking pass upon arrival.