Thomas Kiderle M.Sc.
Phone: | +49 821 598 - 2330 |
Email: | thomas.kiderle@informatik.uni-augsburginformatik.uni-augsburg.de () |
Room: | 2038 (N) |
Address: | Universit?tsstra?e 6a, 86159 Augsburg |
Research Interests
- Analysis and Synthesis of Nonverbal Behavior
- Computational Humor
- Deep Learning
- Virtual Characters
LINKS
Projects
Open Thesis Topics and Practical Modules
I am happy to supervise the following topics in the context of a bachelor thesis, master thesis or project module. The focus of the content can be flexibly adapted so that the interests and expertise of the students are optimally covered.
Furthermore, I am always happy to receive own suggestions for topics, as long as they show a certain overlap with my research focus.
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Virtual Listener Using Conditional Motion Synthesis ? ??
In this project, a photorealistic virtual character will learn how to listen attentively to a speaker in real-time and respond appropriately to the speaker. This can include, for example, nonverbal behavior such as backchanneling (e.g., nodding, smiling), but also the appropriate facial expressions or gestures for the current context. Meta-Human is used for visualization (Epic Games), and state-of-the-art methods from the literature are used for machine learning. The end result is a live pipeline in which the user tells a story and the virtual character applies the learned listener behavior in the meantime.
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Virtual Speaker Using Conditional Motion Synthesis ? ??
In this project, a photorealistic virtual character should learn how to show appropriate nonverbal behavior when speaking. Since this behavior sometimes depends on the context (e.g. emotional vs non-emotional), the facial expressions or gestures for the current speech sequence may vary.? Meta-Human is used for visualization (Epic Games), and state-of-the-art methods from the literature are used for machine learning. The final result is a live pipeline in which the virtual character delivers a story together with the learned nonverbal behavior.
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Discuss with a Virtual Character ? ??
In this project, a pipeline should be created in which a user can have a conversation with a photorealistic character. The character should give appropriate answers (e.g. LLM) and speak with synchronous lip movements. Most of the tools for this already exist at the chair and just need to be assembled. A main focus will be to use an already existing TTS system to generate lip movements and audio.
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Publications
2021 |
Silvan Mertes, Florian Lingenfelser, Thomas Kiderle, Michael Dietz, Lama Diab and Elisabeth André. 2021. Continuous emotions: exploring label interpolation in conditional generative adversarial networks for face generation. In Ana Fred, Carlo Sansone and Kurosh Madani (Ed.). Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Deep Learning Theory and Applications, July 7-9, 2021. SciTePress, Setúbal, 132-139. DOI: 10.5220/0010549401320139 |
Hannes Ritschel, Thomas Kiderle and Elisabeth André. 2021. Implementing parallel and independent movements for a social robot's affective expressions. In 2021 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, Workshops and Demos (ACIIW), 28 September – 1 October, 2021, Virtual Event, Nara, Japan. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, 1-4 DOI: 10.1109/ACIIW52867.2021.9666341 |
Silvan Mertes, Thomas Kiderle, Ruben Schlagowski, Florian Lingenfelser and Elisabeth André. 2021. On the potential of modular voice conversion for virtual agents. In 2021 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, Workshops and Demos (ACIIW), 28 September – 1 October, 2021, Virtual Event, Nara, Japan. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, 1-7 DOI: 10.1109/ACIIW52867.2021.9666349 |
Thomas Kiderle, Hannes Ritschel, Kathrin Janowski, Silvan Mertes, Florian Lingenfelser and Elisabeth André. 2021. Socially-aware personality adaptation. In 2021 9th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, Workshops and Demos (ACIIW), 28 September – 1 October, 2021, Virtual Event, Nara, Japan. IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, 1-8 DOI: 10.1109/ACIIW52867.2021.9666197 |
2020 |
Hannes Ritschel, Thomas Kiderle, Klaus Weber, Florian Lingenfelser, Tobias Baur and Elisabeth André. 2020. Multimodal joke generation and?paralinguistic personalization for a socially-aware robot. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 12092, 278-290. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-49778-1_22 |
Hannes Ritschel, Thomas Kiderle, Klaus Weber and Elisabeth André. 2020. Multimodal joke presentation for social robots based on natural-language generation and nonverbal behaviors. In Second Workshop on Natural Language Generation for Human–Robot Interaction at HRI 2020, March 23, 2020, Cambridge, UK. |