This book is dedicated to the dreamers, their dreams, and their perseverance in research work. This volume brings together the selected and peer-reviewed contributions of the p- ticipants at the COST 2102 International Conference on Verbal and Nonverbal F- tures of Human-Human and Human-Machine Interaction, held in Patras, Greece, October 29-31, 2007, hosted by the 19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2008). The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, cost.esf.org ) in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the - search activity developed within COST Action 2102: "e;Cross-Modal Analysis of V- bal and Nonverbal Communication"e;(cost2102.eu). COST Action 2102 is a network of about 60 European and 6 overseas laboratories whose aim is to develop "e;an advanced acoustical, perceptual and psychological analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication signals originating in spontaneous face-to-face interaction, in order to identify algorithms and automatic procedures capable of identifying the human emotional states. Particular care is devoted to the recognition of emotional states, gestures, speech and facial expressions, in antici- tion of the implementation of intelligent avatars and interactive dialogue systems that could be exploited to improve user access to future telecommunication services"e;(see COST 2102 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) cost2102.eu).

This book is dedicated to the dreamers, their dreams, and their perseverance in research work. This volume brings together the selected and peer–reviewed contributions of the p- ticipants at the COST 2102 International Conference on Verbal and Nonverbal F- tures of Human–Human and Human–Machine Interaction, held in Patras, Greece, October 29–31, 2007, hosted by the 19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2008). The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, cost.esf.org ) in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the - search activity developed within COST Action 2102: “Cross-Modal Analysis of V- bal and Nonverbal Communication”(cost2102.eu). COST Action 2102 is a network of about 60 European and 6 overseas laboratories whose aim is to develop “an advanced acoustical, perceptual and psychological analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication signals originating in spontaneous face-to-face interaction, in order to identify algorithms and automatic procedures capable of identifying the human emotional states. Particular care is devoted to the recognition of emotional states, gestures, speech and facial expressions, in antici- tion of the implementation of intelligent avatars and interactive dialogue systems that could be exploited to improve user access to future telecommunication services”(see COST 2102 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) cost2102.eu).

- Static and Dynamic Processing of Faces, Facial Expressions, and Gaze.- Data Mining Spontaneous Facial Behavior with Automatic Expression Coding.- Ekfrasis: A Formal Language for Representing and Generating Sequences of Facial Patterns for Studying Emotional Behavior.- On the Relevance of Facial Expressions for Biometric Recognition.- Biometric Face Recognition with Different Training and Testing Databases.- Combining Features for Recognizing Emotional Facial Expressions in Static Images.- Mutually Coordinated Anticipatory Multimodal Interaction.- Affordances and Cognitive Walkthrough for Analyzing Human-Virtual Human Interaction.- - Emotional Speech Synthesis and Recognition: Applications to Telecommunication Systems.- Individual Traits of Speaking Style and Speech Rhythm in a Spoken Discourse.- The Organization of a Neurocomputational Control Model for Articulatory Speech Synthesis.- Automatic Speech Recognition Used for Intelligibility Assessment of Text-to-Speech Systems.- ECESS Platform for Web Based TTS Modules and Systems Evaluation.- Towards Slovak Broadcast News Automatic Recording and Transcribing Service.- Computational Stylometry: Who’s in a Play?.- The Acoustic Front-End in Scenarios of Interaction Research.- Application of Expressive Speech in TTS System with Cepstral Description.- Speech Emotion Perception by Human and Machine.- Expressive Speech Synthesis Using Emotion-Specific Speech Inventories.- Study on Speaker-Independent Emotion Recognition from Speech on Real-World Data.- Exploiting a Vowel Based Approach for Acted Emotion Recognition.- Towards Annotation of Nonverbal Vocal Gestures in Slovak.- The CineLingua Approach: Verbal and Non-verbal Features in Second Language Acquisition. Film Narrative to Anchor Comprehension and Production.

This book is dedicated to the dreamers, their dreams, and their perseverance in research work. This volume brings together the selected and peer–reviewed contributions of the p- ticipants at the COST 2102 International Conference on Verbal and Nonverbal F- tures of Human–Human and Human–Machine Interaction, held in Patras, Greece, October 29–31, 2007, hosted by the 19th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI 2008). The conference was sponsored by COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research, cost.esf.org ) in the domain of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for disseminating the advances of the - search activity developed within COST Action 2102: “Cross-Modal Analysis of V- bal and Nonverbal Communication”(cost2102.eu). COST Action 2102 is a network of about 60 European and 6 overseas laboratories whose aim is to develop “an advanced acoustical, perceptual and psychological analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication signals originating in spontaneous face-to-face interaction, in order to identify algorithms and automatic procedures capable of identifying the human emotional states. Particular care is devoted to the recognition of emotional states, gestures, speech and facial expressions, in antici- tion of the implementation of intelligent avatars and interactive dialogue systems that could be exploited to improve user access to future telecommunication services”(see COST 2102 Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) cost2102.eu).