Workshop Keynote - Gabriel Skantze 

Photo of Gabriel.

Gabriel is a Professor in Speech Communication and Technology, with a specialization in Conversational Systems, at the Department of Speech Music and Hearing at KTH in Stockholm as well as a co-founder of Furhat Robotics.

In his research he studies human communication and develop computational models that allow computers and robots to have face-to-face conversations with humans. This involves both verbal and non-verbal (gaze, prosody, etc) aspects of communication, and this research involves phenomena such as turn-taking, feedback, joint attention, and language acquisition. Since social robots are likely to play an important role in our future society, the technology has direct applications, but it can also be used to increase our understanding of the mechanisms behind human communication. This requires an interdisciplinary approach, which includes language technology, artificial intelligence, machine learning, phonetics, and linguistics.