Indication: Professor Hani Camille Yehia – Department of Electronic Engineering – School of Engineering/UFMG
Period: September 21 to October 16, 2009
Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson holds degrees in Physics and Philosophy from St. John’s College, Maryland, United States (1974), certified in Ethnographic Film Production (1976), and MA in Linguistics from Indiana University (1978). From 1982 to 1987 he served, through the American National Institutes of Health (NIH), as a predoctor at Haskins Laboratories in Connecticut, investigating “the organization and control of speech production”. After receiving a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Indiana University in 1987, he was hired as a scientist at the Haskins Laboratory. From 1990 to 2003 he worked at ATR International in Japan. During this time, he and his collaborators have examined production and perception in multimodal communication in complex environments, as well as associated brain functions, especially with spoken language processing, generating over 150 technical papers and journal publications and several patents in coding. and decoding multimodal signals. From 2000 to 2003, he coordinated the Communication Dynamics Project at ATR’s Human Information Science Laboratory. Since 2003, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson has served as Research Chair of Canada at the Canadian Research Council on Natural Sciences and Engineering (NSERC), Level 1, in Linguistics and Cognitive Science and is Director of the Cognitive Systems Program at the University of British Columbia , Vancouver, Canada.
Active research topics:
– interaction of vocal effort with body posture in speech and singing;
– audiovisual correlates of speech production with Lombard effect;
– real-time estimation of space-time coordination of signals;
– examination of linguistic organization from the perspective of communication and “performance”, rather than the perspective of formal coherence and “competence”. Particularly, treatment of linguistic expression as multi-modal and composed of vocal and non-vocal gestural channels.
Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson Specialties:
– measurement and analysis of multimodal behavior;
– dice-based “talking heads” animation;
– orofacial biomechanics and kinematics associated with speech production;
– functional behavior of the three-dimensional jaw during speech and mastication.