[EMOXG] Brief report on f2f with MMI group

Dear EMOXG group members,

here is a brief report on today's session at the multimodal interaction 
group's face-to-face meeting where we discussed possible collaboration 
between the Emotion incubator and the MMI group.

I presented an overview of the current state of the work in the EMOXG 
(attached).  (Note that the list of involved W3C members does not yet 
include Nuance Communications and MIMOS BHD, two groups that have just 
joined the emotion incubator. Welcome!)

Feedback at the meeting was quite positive. Debbie Dahl, chair of the 
MMI group, sees potential collaboration notably on the level of 
combining emotion markup with EMMA [1].

Dan Burnett, co-editor of the SSML [2] standard within the Voice Browser 
group, described our work as "just the right thing", investigating in a 
generic way whether it may make sense to specify emotion. He considers 
it a possibility to use our emotion markup in a future version of SSML.

People agreed that using emotion markup in an "add-on" or "plug-in" 
manner on top of existing markup, as we envisage it, will make it 
easiest to add support for this in existing services.

 From their experience with defining specifications within W3C, several 
  people at the meeting pointed out that writing a first version of a 
spec may take a lot of time. Notably, a first draft usually does not 
require a full Schema defining the language. A first draft can contain 
consensus aspects as well as "issue notes" pointing out unsolved issues 
or possible alternatives.

Finally, options for the future were discussed. As you may know, the 
charter for our Incubator group runs out in November 2008. At that 
point, we will have to decide whether and how to continue in the more 
formal "Recommendation track" -- either by becoming a new working group 
or by joining forces with an existing working group.

There seemed to be a general sentiment at the meeting that the MMI group 
would be interested in having the emotion initiative continue within the 
MMI group; at the same time, there should also be interaction with the 
Voice Browswer group (which does SSML). We should discuss our stance to 
this in our next phone meeting.

As a concrete next step exploring possible cooperation, I will present 
our requirements at one of the next MMI phone conferences.


In summary, from my point of view this looks promising. Despite the 
large amount of work involved, I believe we should push forward with a 
concrete first draft of a specification. I will suggest a series of 
phone meetings in a separate email.

Best regards,
Marc


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/emma/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis11/

-- 
Dr. Marc Schröder, Senior Researcher at DFKI GmbH
Coordinator EU FP7 Project SEMAINE http://www.semaine-project.eu
Chair W3C Emotion ML Incubator http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion
Portal Editor http://emotion-research.net
Team Leader DFKI Speech Group http://mary.dfki.de
Project Leader DFG project PAVOQUE http://mary.dfki.de/pavoque

Homepage: http://www.dfki.de/~schroed
Email: schroed@dfki.de
Phone: +49-681-302-5303
Postal address: DFKI GmbH, Campus D3_2, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 
Saarbrücken, Germany
--
Official DFKI coordinates:
Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122, D-67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313