Oya Aran I am a postdoctoral researcher at Idiap and a Marie Curie fellow. I received my PhD degree from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2008. During my PhD study I focused on hand gesture recognition and sign language recognition. Currently I am working on automatic analysis of group conversations via visual cues in nonverbal communication. My research interests include pattern recognition, machine learning, computer vision and human-computer interaction.

Joan-Isaac Biel Tres I am a first year PhD student at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and a research assistant at Idiap. My research is focused on analyzing human communication and interaction in social media. I graduated in Electrical Engineering (MSc) from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) in 2008, and received a European Master on Speech and Language certificate. I was a scholar researcher at the Speech and Language Applications and Technology Research Center (TALP, UPC) in 2006-2007, where I participated on the CHIL project, carrying out research on acoustic event detection for smart environments. In 2007-2008, I was a visiting researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI, Berkeley), working on language recognition and acoustic background classification for automotive environments.

Gokul T Chittaranjan I am a graduate student in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and I'm visiting Idiap in 2009. I did my undergraduate studies at the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore. Previously, I worked in the area of speaker recognition at Microsoft Research, India. I am broadly interested in speech processing and on the application of machine learning and pattern recognition techniques to solve problems in signal processing.

Trinh-Minh-Tri (Tri) Do I am a postdoctoral researcher at Idiap. I did a PhD in machine learning at LIP6, the computer science laboratory of Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris. My PhD thesis was focused on the development of scalable optimization techniques, and the discriminative training for sequence labeling tasks such as handwriting and speech recognition. I am particularly interested in large-scale applications that necessitate efficient machine learning approaches. Currently I am working on human dynamics analysis from mobile phones.

Katayoun (Kate) Farrahi I am a second year PhD student at EPFL and Idiap. My interests lie in the areas of Activity Modeling, Machine Learning, Reality Mining, Topic Models and Mobile Phone Data. I am currently working on discovering location-driven and proximity-driven human routines from large-scale mobile phone data. We have investigated various types of Topic Models for unsupervised human routine discovery.

Hayley Hung I am a postdoctoral researcher at Idiap. My research interests are mainly focussed around automatically analysing how people behave around each other or ways that social psychology can be used to inspire solutions to problems in computer science. Currently, I am working mostly with conversations in a meeting context but I would like to consider conversations in more relaxed circumstances. I have worked on some more subtle aspects of motion and audio synchrony in meetings and I am interested in how much more subtle aspects of non-verbal communication can be detected using relatively coarse visual features. My background is computer vision but my recent work has involved using both audio and visual fusion. I am interested in working with other modalities too. I am also interested in how interactive art can be used to inform or enhance the design of interaction (either human-human or human-computer).

Dinesh Babu Jayagopi I graduated with a B.Tech degree in Electronics from Madras Institute of Technology, Chennai in 2001. I then obtained a masters in System Science and Signal Processing from Indian Institute of Science in 2003. Between 2003 and 2006, I worked as a senior research engineer at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India. Since 2007, I am a research assistant at Idiap and a doctoral student at EPFL. My research interests include human behaviour analysis and modeling, machine learning, and signal processing.

Radu Negoescu I have started my PhD at EPFL and Idiap in February 2007. My main interests lie at the intersection of Computer Vision, Human Behavior, and what we now call Social Media. I am currently working on modeling social media, using Flickr as data source. We are mainly looking at novel ways of representing the different entities present in such online media repositories, that may eventually allow better management and discovery of information.

Hari Parthasarathi (co-advised with H. Bourlard and M. Magimai-Doss). I am a second year PhD student at EPFL and Idiap. My research is in the area of speech and conversation detection. Recently, I am also fascinated by modeling human activity using speech.

Edgar Francisco Roman Rangel (co-advised with J.-M. Odobez). I am a first year PhD student at EPFL and Idiap since August 2008. My interests are Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Cultural Heritage, Forecasting Techniques and Similarities Among Languages. I am currently working on applying, adapting and developing techniques that could contribute in several ways to the task of processing cultural and historical image collections, improving the job of archaeologists and other people who frequently manage these kind of image data bases.

Dayra Sanchez-Cortes I am a research assistant at Idiap and a PhD student at EPFL. My research interests include machine learning, mobile and ubiquitous computing, human-computer interaction, and human activity modeling. I am currently starting work on modeling activity using nonverbal cues.

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