Felix Putze

I'm a research assistant and PhD student at the Cognitive Systems Lab where Prof. Tanja Schultz is my advisor.

Contact: building 50.21 (Laborgebäude Informatik), room 106
e-mail: felix@ira.uka.de
phone: +49 721 608 4328

Research interests

Current Project

Spoken dialog systems became an essential part of our cars over the last years. They offer eye-free and hands-free access to important functionality, such as navigation devices, phones or radios. The current generation of dialog systems forces the user to adopt an unnatural style of communication. We aim for systems which adapt to the user. To this end, we try to model the driver's traits and state, including the situation inside and outside the car. This includes, but is not limited to: the passengers' emotional state, their cognitive load or stress level, their personality, the type of ongoing human-human conversation or the traffic situation. We plan to employ a large array of modalities which we combine to update our model. Examples for modalities are: voice (prosody) and language, body movement and facial expression, physiological signals (EEG), analysis of environmental noise and steering behavior. We use statistical classifiers to determine the user's current situation. We further investigate the use of a cognitive model, which not only describes but also explains behavior and can used to make predictions on future behavior. This user model is used to automatically learn optimal actions for the dialog system (e.g. via reinforcement learning) which determine the next speech act and its presentation style, e.g. the employed tone, speed or language complexity.

Teaching

Current Semester

Assisting in the course Multilinguale Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation, gave so far four lectures on applications, speech perception, structure of language and digital signal processing.

Past Semesters

Summer term 2008/09

I organized the Praktikum: Benutzerstudien zu natürlichsprachlichen Dialogsystemen where different types of natural dialog systems were created and evaluated in user tests.

Winter term 2008

Assisted in the course Multilinguale Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation, gave five lectures on dialog modeling, language modeling and classificatio

Students: Studien- und Diplomarbeiten

Open

I am always looking for students as Hiwis, Studienarbeiter or Diplomarbeiter. Currently, I am looking for a motivated student to investigate automated methods to estimate the complexity of understanding system utterances by the user. Other projects may also be available. Feel free to mail, phone or visit me.

Ongoing