Streams

The summer school will comprise morning lectures by invited speakers, as well as practical courses in the afternoons. For the afternoon courses, you may select one from the following four streams:

• Stream 1: Mechanisms of Active Exploration and Multisensory Integration
• Stream 2: Attentional Mechanisms in Language Processing and Communication: from Humans to Virtual Agents
• Stream 3: Structuring and Coordinating Attention
• Stream 4: Motion and Attention

Abstracts

Stream 1: Mechanisms of Active Exploration and Multisensory Integration

How do animals and humans actively explore their environment? What part of their sensory infrastructure do they employ? How do multi-modal sensory systems act together? In this stream, participants will carry out experiments on humans, insects and electric fish, addressing different issues of context-dependent, active exploration. The experiments will provide an inside view into the latest methodology applied to the field of active sensing and sensory integration. More details

Stream 2: Attentional Mechanisms in Language Processing and Communication: from Humans to Virtual Agents

The following stream will provide an introduction to the role of visual attention in language processing and communication. Methodological approaches to visual attention will be illustrated, focussing in particular on eye-tracking applications; participants will be given the possibility to get practical hands-on experience with state of the art eye trackers (Eye Link 1000, SeeingMachines, FaceLab) in different application domains. The first part of the course focusses on the investigation of how listeners process sentences in a given visual context. Participants will learn the basics of running psycholinguistic experiments and analysing eye-tracking data. The second part of the course then looks at the role of visual attention in face-to-face dialogue and at how interlocutors’ gaze behaviour can be analysed in real-time and modelled computationally for human-agent interaction. Participants will learn how to process gaze data as soon as it is produced by the eye tracker, how to interpret it, and how a virtual agent's reactions can be modelled. More details

Stream 3: Structuring and Coordinating Attention

This stream examines attention from several perspectives. There will be modules which investigate the ways in which attention mechanisms develop  in human infants within situated contexts and natural interactions. Further modules will examine alignment in AR-based scenarios. There will also be modules which look at attention from a robots perspective. On the one hand visual attention for robotic systems will be the topic. On the other hand there will be a modules that look at attention in mobile robotics. More details

Attention for perception and movement - from experimental studies to moving systems. Attending to dynamic scenes and motor control are key cognitive capabilities enabling human and artificial agents to make sense of their environments and of occurring events and to plan the proper motor response for the task at hand. The stream provides insights into recent experiments revealing information about human attention using motion analysis with high-speed-motion-tracking system, EEG, eyetracking studies and augmented reality systems. The stream contains interweaved modules on formal modeling of motion patterns, computational modeling of attention as well as their implementation on two-handed robot systems to analyze the role attention plays in human and artificial motion. More details