Welcome to Manufacts,
the new ISGS newsletter!

As a service to the gesture community and anyone who is interested, ISGS will bring you news and updates from the society and the community of gesture research. Look here for information on what people are doing in the field of gesture studies, and submit your information to share with your colleagues. Please send all news items (including information on conferences, new books, etc.) to ISGS' public relations officer, Anna Kuhlen. You do not have to be a member to submit a link or notice to Manufacts.

ISGS news

August 2010

Job Openings in Dr. Sotaro Kita's lab (University of Birmingham, UK)

(1) Instructor and Research Support (60% full time equivalent, Grade 6) for up to 21 months. This may be a good opportunity for those who are at the final stage of writing up the PhD thesis or who just finished PhD. The successful candidate will support Dr. Kita's teaching and research activities. There will also be an opportunity to develop your own project in Dr. Kita's lab. The ad is at http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ABO613/instructor-and-research-support/ with the application deadline on the 31st August 2010. Expected interview dates are 9 or 10th of September.

(2) Research Assistant (80 or 100% full time equivalent, Grade 6) for 6 or 7.5 months. The position is in the process of getting approved by the University. This is appropriate for people with bachelar's or master's degree in psychology who are interested in research careers. This position supports the project on individual difference in gesture production, in collaboration with Dr. Mingyuan Chu and Prof. Antje Meyer. The position is likely to be advertised in mid September 2010, and the position can be taken up late October 2010. Please contact Dr. Kita for more details.

For more information about Dr. Kita's research see http://www.psychology-people.bham.ac.uk/people/sotaro.kita.

July 2010

Welcome to the new Executive Board of the ISGS

At its last General Assembly meeting the new executive board was elected. Find the new board members here. The ISGS greatly appreciates all of the work that the old board has done on its behalf and thanks Fey Parrill, Gale Stam, Judith Holler, Lorenza Mondada, Mandana Seyfeddinipur who are stepping down after serving ISGS the past few years.

Successful fourth ISGS conference at Frankfurt an der Oder

The fourth conference of the ISGS, “Gesture- Evolution, Brain, and Linguistic Structure”, was held July 25- 30th 2010 at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt ( Oder), Germany. The conference was generously hosted by Cornelia Müller, Jana Bressem, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, Susanne Tag, Sedinha Tessendorf und Ulrike Wrobel. 260 speakers from all around the world presented their research over the course of five days. Over 300 people interested in gesture research attended the conference. The conference was featured in the German press (Tagesspiegel, Hamburger Abendblatt), and radio (Kulturradio). Click for conference program or abstracts.

ISGS holds first summer school “Handling gesture: Theory and Method in Gesture Studies”

Preceding its fourth conference, the ISGS held its first summer school July 19-24th 2010, organized by Judith Holler, Lorenza Mondada, and Mandana Seyfeddinipur. Over the course of one week, 30 young researchers from all over the world were trained by leading experts in the field. Lecturers from different disciplines introduced students to theoretical and methodological approaches to studying gestures. Hands-on workshops demonstrated how to record and digitize data, and how to annotate and code data with the software tool ELAN. In addition to a poster session and guided data sessions, students had many opportunities to informally present and discuss their research projects and data in one-on-one meetings with experts such as Adam Kendon and Janet Bavelas.

All students received a full scholarship to cover their travel and accommodation costs.  The summer school was fully funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung.

We thank the organizers, teaching staff, and participants for making this great event happen and hope there will be many more ISGS summer schools to follow!

For more information visit the summer school website.

April 2010

ISGS offers student bursaries for conference attendance

The International Society for Gesture Studies will this year be offering up to 10 student bursaries up to a maximum of 500 Euros to cover the costs associated with attending the conference. Students whose abstract has beed accepted for the conference can apply. In order to select the awardees, the committee will consider the following criteria:

1) The quality of your accepted abstract (which will only be considered if you are the sole or the first author of it)

2) Your financial situation

- Please note that you can NOT apply if you have already been awarded an ISGS summer school stipend.

- Bursary funds will be dispensed at the conference. Please note that you can NOT be awarded both an ISGS student bursary AND the Best Student Paper Award. Therefore, if you were informed that you would be awarded a bursary, but also win the Best Paper Award competition, your bursary will be cancelled.

In order to apply, please send us your 500 word abstract (the same one that you handed in to apply for the conference) and complete the questionnaire BursaryQuestionaire.doc.

Application deadline is May 14th.

Please send your applications to: judith.holler@manchester.ac.uk

March 2010

Post-doc position on the neuropsychology of gesture production is available at the Department of Neurology, Psychosomatic Medicine, and Psychiatry (Prof. H. Lausberg) at the German Sport University, Cologne, Germany 

The post-doc position is available in the research project “Gestures as indicators of cognitive and emotional process – Investigations of split-brain patients on the neuropsychology of gesture production” granted by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The position is for two years (50%) or alternatively, for one year (100%) and a renewal is possible until 2014 if additional research grants are acquired.The successful applicant is expected to supervise a research project on gesture production in split-brain patients and to analyse gestural behaviour with the NEUROGES-ELAN system. For more info here: DFG-Postdoc.pdf.

Workshop 'Current developments in primate gesture research,' July 24, 2010

The Workshop “Current developments in primate gesture research” in connection with the 4th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies
Gesture – Evolution, Brain, and Linguistic Structures , will take place at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany on July 24, 2010. More information can be found at http://www.isgs2010.de/ or www.primate-gesture-center (see events) or http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/Simone.Pika/pdf/Workshop-ISGS_2010.pdf.

February 2010

ISGS announces the 1st Summer School on Gesture Studies: Handling Gesture: Theory and Method in Gesture Studies

The 1st summer school of the ISGS: Handling Gesture: Theory and Method in Gesture Studies will take place in Frankfurt and der Oder, July 19-24, 2010, during the week opreceding the 4th ISGS conference. The school is generously funded by the Volkswagenstiftung. Particiaption is based on successful application. There are 30 stipends available. For more information visit the summer school website.

January 2010

PhD studentship available at University of Birmingham

The PhD studentships/scholarships available at the University of Birmingham (UK). For those who are interested in pursing a PhD with Dr. Sotaro Kita (University of Birmingham), the School of Psychology at Birmingham has up to 10 studentships (UK/EU tuition + living expenses). The applicants from outside of the EU should consider applying to Overseas Research Scholarship from the College of Life and Environmental Sciences to get additional funding to cover the difference between UK/ EU tuition and "overseas" tuition (tuition for students from outside of the EU). The students who are interested should contact Dr. Kita by the end of January 2010 http://psychology-people.bham.ac.uk/people-pages/detail.php?identity=kitas

December 2009

SSPNet Workshop on Foundations of Social Signals will take place in Rome, Italy, 3-5 December 2009      

The Workshop on Foundations of Social Signals will be held in Rome, on December 3-5, 2009. The event will gather researchers from different SSPNet partners and from the rest of the scientific community. The workshop will include presentations by young SSPNet researchers (mainly PhD students and postoctoral researchers) aimed at giving an overview of SSPNet activities(pdf). Two distinguished scholars (Arie Nadler and Cristiano Castelfranchi) will give key note talks. For more information, visit the site of the workshop: http://www.idiap.ch/~vincia/fssw/Welcome.html

October 2009

Call for participation of the Sign Linguistics Corpora Network (SLCN) Worskhop on metadata, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 13 November 2009      

The second workshop of the Sign Linguistics Corpora Network is devoted to Metadata for sign language resources, and will take place in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. It will be a small-scale and highly interactive event. The goal is to inform sign researchers about recent developments on metadata in the EU CLARIN project, and at updating an earlier list of sign-specific metadata categories that were the output of a workshop in 2003. The organizers would like to invite anyone with an interest in or specific experience with sign language data collections to join them in this one- day workshop. Further enquiries can be directed at Onno Crasborn, o.crasborn@let.ru.nl. They look forward to a wide participation from the sign linguistics community, and hope you will be able to join us on November 13th in   the Netherlands.  The workshop languages will be English and ASL (for more information visit http://www.ru.nl/slcn).

September 2009

Call for papers for the 12th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon) with the special theme: GESTURE AS LANGUAGE, GESTURE AND LANGUAGE

The 12th Conference on Laboratory Phonology will be held at the University of New Mexico Albuquerque, 8-10 July 2010. The special theme of the 2010 conference is Gesture as Language, Gesture and Language. The deadline for abstract submissions is November 20, 2009. More information at conference website http://www.unm.edu/~labfon12/

Call for papers for the 3rd International Conference on Music and Gesture

The 3rd International Conference on Music and Gesture will be held at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal, Canada on March 5-6, 2010, as part of the MusiMarch 2010. The organizers encourage the submission of abstracts describing novel research on
gesture and music (for more information see pdf)

Workshop on gesture coding in empirical research: Gesture coding with the Neuroges-Elan System

From October 1-7 there will be a workshop on gesture coding in empirical research. The NEUROGES coding system consists of three modules which progress from gesture kinetics to gesture function. Grounded on empirical neuropsychological and psychological studies, the theoretical assumption behind NEUROGES is that its main kinetic and functional movement categories are differentially associated with specific cognitive, emotional, and interactive functions. ELAN is a free multimodal annotation tool for digital audio and video media. It supports multi-levelled transcription and complies with standards like XML (Extensible Markup Language) and Unicode (for more information see pdf).

MGA Workshop – Methods of Gesture Analysis: “From form to meaning”

This workshop is the third event in a series of workshops dedicated to Methods of Gesture Analysis (MGA). Previous locations include European-University Viadrina and VU University Amsterdam. The workshop brings together experts in gesture research and doctoral students, post-docs, and faculty who wish to receive hands-on training in the analysis of spontaneous coverbal gestures. The workshop will take place at Human Technology Centre (HumTec), RWTH Aachen University, October 8-10, 2009 (for more information see pdf).

July 2009

The website of the 4th ISGS conference is up and running

The 4th ISGS conference will take place in Frankfurt an der Oder (near Berlin). The website of the conference is now up and running. So please check back regularly on the newest updates (http://www.isgs2010.de).

Postdoc position on the neurology of gesture production

At the Department of Neurology, Psychosomatic Medicine, and Psychiatry (Prof. H. Lausberg) at the German Sport University, Cologne, Germany
A post-doc position is available in the interdisciplinary research project „Towards a grammar of gesture: Evolution, brain, and linguistic structures“ (www.togog.org) granted by the VolkswagenStiftung. The position is for one year and a renewal is possible until 2014 if additonal research grants are acquired. The successful applicant is expected to supervise a research project on gesture production in patients with right and left hemisphere damage and to analyse gestural behaviour with the NEUROGES-ELAN system. She/he has the opportunity to join research projects focussing on the neurobiological correlates of gesture production by using NearInfraRedSpectroscopy (NIRS) as well as to pursue his/her own research as long as the projects relate to the ongoing lab activities (for more information pdf).

June 2009

Two doctoral two postdoctoral positions in gesture research project at RWTH Aachen (Germany)

HumTec (Human Technology Centre) is an interdisciplinary project house at RWTH Aachen University, located one hour West of Cologne and right on the borders with Belgium and the Netherlands (http://www.humtec.rwth-aachen.de). HumTec invites applications for several doctoral and post-doctoral positions anchored in the newly established, interdisciplinary research program Natural Media Engineering: Emotion and Cognition Interactions and their Modification. The project explores the various functions natural media serve in human face-to-face interaction and in human-computer interaction. Of central interest is the interplay of speech, gestures, and facial expressions (for more information pdf).

March 2009

ICLC 11 conference in Berkeley (2009) !!!

The ICLC 11 conference that was supposed to take place in Berkeley in summer 2009 was canceled, for more information on the next conference visit http://www.cogling.org/iclcconfs.shtml.

January 2009

Visit website of the Manchester Gesture Center

The website of the Manchester Gesture Center is up. Visit the website for updates on newest research and activities in at the Manchester Gesture Center (http://www.manchestergesturecentre.org.uk/).

Special Issue on Gesture in Language and Cognitive Processes

The Special Issue on "Speech-accompanying gestures" edited by Sotaro Kita just appeared in Language and Cognitive Processes Vol. 24, Issue 2., 2009, with the following eight articles.
(1) Cross-cultural variation of speech-accompanying gesture: A review
Sotaro Kita
(2) Co-speech gestures in a naming task: Developmental data
Silvia Stefanini; Arianna Bello; Maria Cristina Caselli; Jana M. Iverson; Virginia Volterra
(3) When gesture-speech combinations do and do not index linguistic change
Seyda Ozcaliskan; Susan Goldin-Meadow
(4) Changes in frame of reference use across the preschool years: A longitudinal study of the gestures and speech produced during route descriptions
Kazuki Sekine
(5) Effects of different types of hand gestures in persuasive speech on receivers' evaluations
Fridanna Maricchiolo; Augusto Gnisci; Marino Bonaiuto; Gianluca Ficca
(6) Communicating common ground: How mutually shared knowledge influences speech and gesture in a narrative task
Judith Holler; Katie Wilkin
(7) Co-speech gesture in bimodal bilinguals
Shannon Casey; Karen Emmorey
(8) Brief training with co-speech gesture lends a hand to word learning in a foreign language
Spencer D. Kelly; Tara McDevitt; Megan Esch

ISGS news

The 4th ISGS conference will take place 25th-30st July 2010, in Germany, Berlin and Frankfurt an der Oder (NB: this is NOT Frankfurt am Main). The conference will be organised by the leaders of the togog project (www.togog.org) Cornelia Mueller, Ellen Fricke, Hedda Lausberg and Katja Liebal, as well as the project coordinator Ulrike Wrobel.
We are also in the process of organising a summer school (Mandana Seyfeddinipur, Lorenza Mondada and Judith Holler) which will directly precede or the ISGS conference in Frankfurt and der Oder.
Since it is the beginning of the new year, we would like to kindly remind you to renew your membership for 2009. For membership renewal, please go to Join ISGS.

Please join our ISGS mailinglist to be up to date on the news !!!

Workshop on Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM) 2009 Workshop: Metaphor, Metonymy & Multimodality (4-5 June 2009, Amsterdam)

The analysis of metaphor in different modalities, not just in written texts, elucidates the vital ties between metaphor and metonymy in meaning-making. This workshop therefore integrates these three topics for its theme. The multiple forms of expression to be considered include written words, spoken language, the pictorial mode (still and moving images), sound, and the gestural mode. Attention will be focused on the multimodal use of metaphor and metonymy in TV advertising, film, comics, animation, naturalistic spoken discourse, experimental settings, and foreign language teaching.

The workshop will feature a combination of plenary lectures, introducing basic concepts, and hands-on workshops, in which the plenary speakers will guide participants in the analysis of materials. There will be two plenaries on the analysis of images and two on gestures, and three workshops on each of the modes of images and gestures. The same hands-on workshops will run on both days so that participants may take part in two out of the three on each topic. For details, see the list of abstracts for the plenary lectures and hands-on workshops, with the overview of the tentative schedule, on the RaAM website (http://www.raam.org.uk/Home.html). Note that there will also be time allotted for a poster session by participants who wish to present their own research on multimodal metaphor and/or metonymy.

October 2008

Gesture course at the Linguistic Institute 2009 at UC Berkeley

Susan Duncan will be teaching a 3 week course at the summer school of the Linguistic Society of America (http://www.lsadc.org/), which takes place from July 27 until August 13 at UC Berkeley, USA (http://lsa2009.berkeley.edu/). This will be the second gesture course at an LSA Summer Insititute after the legendary class Adam Kendon and David McNeill co-taught at the LSA in 1995.

PhD positions for Gesture Research

PhD position in Manchester, UK on: Grounding gesture and language in space
The School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester invites applications for a prestigious PhD studentship commencing in October 2009. (http://www.findaphd.com/search/showproject.asp?projectid=19032).

PhD position in Manchester, UK on: Cues to deception: A micro-analytic approach to imagistic gesture and speech
The School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester invites applications for a prestigious PhD studentship commencing in October 2009. (http://www.findaphd.com/search/showproject.asp?projectid=19030).

PhD position at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands on bilingualism and gesture
The Center for Language Studies inivites applications for the PhD project 'Thinking for code-switching: Evidence from speech and gesture' (http://www2.ru.nl/cgi-bin/vacature/xmlrec2html.pl?recid=483961).

Symposium on Gesture on Italian Art

A group of Masters Students in Florence (Syracuse University) will be giving a Symposium on Gesture in Italian Art. The symposium will take place on December 12, 2008 at 3pm at Villa Rossa, Syracuse University in Florence 15, Piazza Savonarola, 50132 Florence. The papers that will be presented are:

Botticelli's Calumny: The Gestural Language of Florence in the Late 15th Century.
From Human Speech to the Word of God: The Evolution of the Gesture of Benediction
Hand-Picked Poses: The Use of Gestures in Pinturicchio's Piccolomini Library
Reading, Devotion, and the Iconography of Silence
Gesture and Narrative in the Art of the Annunciation: An Analysis of Primary Sources
The Gesture of Finger Counting: Representations of Dialectic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Artists' Use of Gesture in Last Judgment Scenes
Within Reach: Communication, Humility, and Acceptance in Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul

Call for papers for special session on gesture

Ellen Fricke, (European University Viadrana, Frankfurt/Oder) and Simon Harrison (University of Bordeaux) are organizing a session on gesture at the The Third International conference of the French Cognitive Linguistics Association, University of Paris 10-Nanterre, May 27-29, 2009. The deadline for paper submissions is November 24, 2008.

July 2008

Three gesture conferences in 2009!!!

The gesture community is growing. In 2009 three conferences/workshops will take place in Europe all dedicated to the study of gesture.

The 8th International Gesture Workshop Gesture in Embodied Communication and Human-Computer Interaction: GW 2009

GW 2009 aims to bring together people from different research strands that concern themselves with gesture-based communication, but tend to take different perspectives in doing so. For researchers in computer science, engineering, or human-computer interaction, the workshop will provide a well-known forum to present recent approaches to using gesture or sign language as a means of interacting with machines. In addition, GW 2009 addresses researchers from Linguistics as well as the cognitive, neuro and computer sciences to bring to bear their new theoretical insights into the embodied bases of human verbal and nonverbal communication. We thus invite researchers from both realms to come and meet at GW 2009 in order to exchange ideas, connect discoveries, and further the advancement of gesture-based human-machine interaction (http://www.gw2009.de/).

International Conference on Multimodality of communication in children: gestures, emotions, language and cognition: MULTIMOD 2009

The MULTIMOD 2009 conference is being organized jointly by psychologists and linguists from the Universities of Toulouse (Toulouse II) and Grenoble (Grenoble III) and will take place in Toulouse in July 2009. The aim of this international conference will be to assess research on theories, concepts and methods relating to multimodality in children (http://w3.eccd.univ-tlse2.fr/multimod2009/index.php?pg=acc&lg=en ).

International Conference on Gesture and Speech in Interaction: GESPIN 2009

The Centre for Speech and Language Processing at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland is organising an international conference on speech and gesture in interaction; GESPIN 2009. The conference will take place in September 2009. The aim of the conference is to promote interdisciplinary perspectives to allow for the most efficient understanding of the complexity of multimodal communication. Therefore, linguists, psychologists, phoneticians, speech technologists and language engineers as well as researchers from all other fields who share the interest in speech and gesture-based communication are invited to participate in the GESPIN conference (http://www.ifa.amu.edu.pl/~gespin/).

May 2008

Call for papers for panel Gestures in communication: Processes of concretization and abstraction

Ellen Fricke, Irene Mittelberg, and Sedinha Teßendorf are organizing a panel titled Gestures in communication: Processes of concretization and abstraction at the 12^th International Congress of the German Society for Semiotics (DGS) “The concrete as a sign” (“Das Konkrete als Zeichen”) in Stuttgart, Germany, October 9-12, 2008 (http://www.dgs-stuttgart-2008.de).  A special focus of the panel will be on the topics of deixis and indexicality, metonymy and metaphor, ritualization and stylization, as well as on specification and concretization of lexical meaning and mental imagery via gestures (call: doc , pdf).

April 2008

Special Issue on Gesture and Communicative Development

The Special Issue of the Journal First Language: Gesture and Communicative Development edited by Michèle Guidett and Elena Nicoladis is published (http://fla.sagepub.com/content/vol28/issue2/).

Febuary 2008

ISGS electronic sign up and payment possible now

Members of the ISGS who want to renew their membership and people who want to become members can now sign up and pay electronically via PayPal (join).

Workshop: Gesture: A comparison of signed and spoken languages

There will be a workshop on the comparison of signed and spoken languages at 30. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft fuer Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) (homepage), Bamberg, Germany, 27-29 Febuary 2008 . The workshop program and the abstracts are now available.

Call for papers for a workshop within the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008): "Multimodal corpora: From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications", 27 May 2008, Marrakech (Morocco)

This workshop continues the successful series of similar workshops at LREC 00, 02, 04 and 06 (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/ )Also documented in a special issue of the Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation due to come out in spring 2008. There is an increasing interest in multimodal communication and multimodal corpora as visible by European Networks of Excellence and integrated projects such as HUMAINE, SIMILAR, CHIL, AMI, CALLAS. Furthermore, the success of recent conferences and workshops dedicated to multimodal communication (ICMI, IVA, Gesture, PIT, Nordic Symposia on Multimodal Communication, Embodied Language Processing) and the creation of the Journal of Multimodal User Interfaces also testifies to the growing interest in this area, and the general need for data on multimodal behaviours. The focus of this LREC'2008 workshop on multimodal corpora will be on models of natural interaction and their contribution to the design of multimodal systems and applications (pdf).

January 2008

Submission deadline for the AISB Symposium on Multimodal Output Generation is extended to January 18, 2008

The organizers of the Mog 2008 decided to extend the submission deadline. For details see below (November 2007).

New version of the annotation tool ANVIL released

A new version of the annotation tool ANVIL was realeased. The software if free and can be requested here (homepage). The documentation of the new features can be downloaded here. The new version has a number of new features:

* Multiple videos
* Spatial annotation
* Relative path names
* Fixed PRAAT import
* Images in the coding manual
* Switching on/off + zooming tracks
* Improved export function (project tool)
* Improved waveform loader
* Refurbished plugin interface

In cases of question and support please contact the developer Michael Kipp (support@anvil-software.de).

Two research positions (PhD) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligance (DFKI)

The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) is the leading German research institute in the field of innovative software technology. Based in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Bremen and Berlin, the DFKI ranks among the important "Centers of Excellence" worldwide.

The DFKI at Saarbrücken, Germany, is seeking 2 RESEARCHERS (full-time) for a research position in the area of intelligent user interfaces. The earliest start date is March 2008. The duration of the contract will be 2 years with a potential extension of one year. Candidates are expected to work towards a PhD degree in this time.

The positions will be affiliated with the independent research group "Embodied Assistants for Multimodal Interaction", established as part of the Cluster of Excellence "Multimodal Computing and Interaction", a co-operation between Saarland University, DFKI, MPI Informatik and MPI Softwaresysteme. The group's research vision is a natural interaction between human users and autonomous embodied agents in 3D worlds. Current topics comprise artificial intelligence methods for controlling virtual humans, realistic character animation and innovative 3D interaction techniques.

We are looking for international applications from students with a finished computer science degree (Diplom, MSc or equivalent) and a research background in AI and/or computer graphics. Solid practical programming skills are desirable, knowledge in computational linguistics and cognitive psychology is highly welcome. Good knowledge of written and spoken English is required (info).

November 2007

Call for papers for the AISB Symposium on Multimodal Output Generation
(submission deadline extended to January 18, 2008)

The MOG 2008 Symposium is part of the AISB 2008 Convention on Communication, Interaction and Social Intelligence, April 1-4, 2008, Aberdeen, Scotland. The AISB symposium MOG 2008 aims to bring work on multimodal output generation from different disciplines together to establish common ground and discuss possible future collaborations. Besides contributions from research fields such as multimodal language generation and embodied conversational agents, we would like to bring in an additional angle by investigating how research on multimodal output generation can benefit from a non-engineering perspective on multimodality. For example, how can research done in psychology and cognitive sciences, related to understanding how humans perceive and process multimodal information, be properly formalized for the purposes of intelligent multimodal output generation? And to what extent is it possible to formalize existing theories about how meaning is made in multimodal communication and use that for generating more meaningful multimodal output in the context of intelligent systems? The interdisciplinary approach and persepective is reflected in our guest speakers: Justine Cassell (Northwestern University), Eija Ventola (University of Helsinki) and Michelle Zhou (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center). Thus, contributions are invited that are technically oriented as well as work in the area of human communication, such as cognitive models of multimodal communication and interaction. This way, we hope to combine an AI/engineering perspective with input from other disciplines such as linguistics and psychology, providing a forum where international researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds can exchange ideas on multimodal output generation and engage in scientific research collaboration (call).

September 2007

Postdoc position at National University of Singapore

The Language and Gesture Laboratory is a new laboratory in Department of Psychology at National University of Singapore (www.fas.nus.edu.sg/psy). It studies how adults and children speaking in different languages use gesture to communicate and the role of gesture in reflecting thinking. We are looking for a two-year postdoc. The topic is relatively open as long as it relates to speech and gesture communication in adult and children. Postdocs are also encouraged to collaborate with other research clusters at the University. More information on Language and Gesture Laboratory can be found at http://wingchee.googlepages.com/>. Applicants should go to http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/research/pfp.html for details.

Call for papers for a special issue on Gesture in Multimodal Systems

This special issue of the International Journal of Semantic Computing (www.worldscinet.com/ijsc) is concerned with models of gesture that can contribute to semantics for multimodal systems. We see this as ranging from simply using gesture to help understand the most salient part of another modality, e.g., speech, to full-blown gestural interfaces, to the building of data/corpora to support this research (call).

June 2007

The third conference of the ISGS in Chicago was a great success

The third conference of the ISGS took place at Northwestern University in Chicago, USA. The conference was organized with great success by Ric Ashley, Justine Cassell, Susan Duncan, Susan Goldin Meadow, David McNeill and Gale Stam. Scientists from all around the world presented their research over a course of 4 days (program and abstracts). The conference was featured in an article by the Chicago Tribune (pdf).

May 2007

Special about Adam Kendon in Semiotic Bulletin 9

The recent issue of the Semiotic Bulletin 9 includes a special about Adam Kendon. The artcile written by Cornelia Müller gives an overview of his life and work (http://www.semioticon.com/semiotix/semiotix9/index.html).

The Berlin Gesture Center opens at the Museum for Communication in Berlin

As of June 1st the Berlin Gesture Center organizes  trainings, a lecture series, and a monthly colloquium in cooperation with the Museum of Communications in Berlin, Germany. The opening event "HANDS, LANGUAGE, GESTURES" will take place on Friday, June 1st , 4 pm with a series of three lectures by Hedda Lausberg, Ellen Fricke and Cornelia Müller (http://www.berlingesturecenter.de/museumfuerkommunikation/eroeffnung1juni07.html).

April 2007

Call for papers for the International Conference Language, Communication and Cognition

The University of Brighton (UK) hosts the conference "Language, Communication and Cognition" in August 2008. The conference includes a theme session "The role of gesture in communication and cognition" with Sotaro Kita and Alan Cienki as discussants (http://www.languageandcognition.net).

John Benjamins Publishing Company is launching the new book series Gesture Studies to accompany its journal Gesture.

Gesture Studies aims to publish book-length publications on all aspects of gesture. Topics may include, but are by not limited to: the relationship between gesture and speech; the role gesture may play in communication in all the circumstances of social interaction, including conversations, the work-place or instructional settings; gesture and cognition; the development of gesture in children; the place of gesture in first and second language acquisition; the processes by which spontaneously created gestures may become transformed into codified forms; the documentation and discussion of vocabularies of ‘quotable’ or ‘emblematic’ gestures; the relationship between gesture and sign; studies of gesture systems or sign languages such as those that have developed in factories, religious communities or in tribal societies; the role of gesture in ritual interactions of all kinds, such as greetings, religious, civic or legal rituals; gestures compared cross-culturally; gestures in primate social interaction; biological studies of gesture, including discussions of the place of gesture in language origins theory; gesture in multi-modal human-machine interaction; historical studies of gesture; and studies in the history of gesture studies, including discussions of gesture in the theatre or as a part of rhetoric
(http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=GS).

The first volume in the series is in honor of David McNeill: "Gesture and the Dynamic View of Language. Essays in honor of David McNeill" edited by Susan Duncan, Justine Cassell and Elena Levy (http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_bookview.cgi?bookid=GS%201).

January 2007

From 2007 on the journal GESTURE will appear 3 times a year!

Due to the success of the Journal GESTURE, Benjamins has increased the publication rate from two times to three times a year!

Call for papers for the special issue, "Speech-accompanying gestures", in Language and Cognitive Processes

The guest editor will be Sotaro Kita (Univ. of Birmimgham, UK, s.kita@bham.ac.uk). The special issue aims to provide the state-of- the-art papers on the rapidly developing field of speech-accompanying gestures. The journal seeks papers reporting quantitative studies on any aspects of speech-accompanying gestures, including developmental, neuropsychological, and neuroscientific studies. The submission deadline is June 30th, 2007. The papers should be submitted from the journal's on-line submission facility to be found on the journal's home page (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/01690965.asp). Please specify the name of the special issue in the Step 5 of the submission procedure. Please see the "Instructions for Authors" for further details of the manuscript preparation.

November 2006

New gesture group at Stony Brook

A burgeoning community of young gesture researchers has emerged at Stony Brook in the last three years. The Stony Brook Gesture Group is an interdisciplinary forum for addressing current directions in gesture research. Their weekly meetings draw a consistent and lively set of participants from the Departments of Psychology, Linguistics, and Computer Science (http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~adaptation/gesturegroup/)

September 2006

Call for papers for the 2nd International AFLiCo Conference: Typology, Gesture and Sign

The second international AFLiCo conference on typology, gesture, and sign will trake place in Lille, France (Université Lille 3), 10-12 May 2007 (http://aflico.asso.univ-lille3.fr/Events/colloque2007/).

Conference at Bielefeld University

The concluding Conference "Embodied Communication II: An Integrated Perspective" of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF): Research Group 2005/2006 "Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines" took place at Bielfeld University, Bielefeld, Germany. The organizers were Ipke Wachsmuth (Bielefeld) and Günther Knoblich (Newark)
(http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/(en)/ZIF/AG/2006/09-04-Wachsmuth.html).

July 2006

Call for papers for the 3rd Conference of the ISGS

Workshop at Bielefeld University

As part of the research year "Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines", the workshop "The Forward-Looking Nature of Embodied Communication: Projection, Participation, and Time-Scales in Social Interaction" took place at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University, Bielefeld. The workshop was organized by Jürgen Streeck (Austin, TX) and Scott Jordan (Normal, IL),
(http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/(en)/ZIF/AG/2006/07-10-Streeck.html).

Workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences

The Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences held a workshop on the neurocognition of gesture processing. The workshop was organised by Thomas C. Gunter and Henning Holle (http://www.cbs.mpg.de/files/Projects/Workshop_gesture/).

June 2006

Call for papers for a special issue of First Language

Michèle Guidetti (Université Toulouse II, France) and Elena Nicoladis (University of Alberta, Canada) are editing a special issue of First Language (Gesture and Communicative Development). The two guest editors have issued the call for papers (call (pdf))

October 2005

Gesture Studies in Southern Europe: A Conference on the Island of Procida

Between the 20th and 23rd of October 2005 the Island of Procida in the Bay of Naples was the site for a small meeting in which research in gesture studies from Italy and elsewhere in Europe was presented and discussed (program and abstracts (pdf)). It was appropriate that this meeting should be held on Procida, since this is the birthplace of Andrea de Jorio (1769-1851), the Neapolitan pioneer of gesture studies. The meeting was organized by Adam Kendon (University of Naples “Orientale” and University of Calabria) and Tommaso Russo (University of Calabria), together with Daniele Gambarara (University of Calabria) and Arturo Martone (University of Naples “Orientale”) under the title: "Il gesto nel Mediterraneo: studi recenti sulla gestualità nel sud d’Europa - Gesture in the Mediterranean: Recent Research in Southern Europe". It was sponsored by the University of Naples “Orientale” and the University of Calabria, with funds from the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research (MUIR), with additional support from the Comune of Procida, the Province of Naples and the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies of Naples. The aim of the conference was to bring together leading workers on gesture in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, as well as some younger workers, to create an opportunity in which recent developments in gesture studies could be presented and discussed in the relatively intimate atmosphere that the island of Procida provides . There were eighteen invited speakers and about twenty other participants. The invited speakers were encouraged to present surveys of their work and to discuss their general approach to problems in gesture research. The following papers were presented and discussed (for revised texts of these papers click here )

Marino Bonaiuto (Univeristy of Rome “La sapienza”):
Structure and functions of manual gestures in conversation: Conceptual problems and possible future developments.
Genevieve Calbris (CNRS - Université René Descartes):
Gesture in Speech: a symbolic system.
Olga Capirci (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) and National Research Council (CNR) - Rome):
Gesture and speech: the emergence and development of a strong and changing partnership,
Sabina Fontana (University of Palermo):
Gestures and Signs: What are the boundaries between them?
Daniele Gambarara (University of Calabria):
Between gesture and oral expression: systematicity and the faculty of language
Maria Graziano (University of Naples “Orientale” and Suor Orsola Benincasa University, Naples):
A contrastive and comparative analysis of gestures of the family “Open Hand Supine”.
Adam Kendon (University of Naples “Orientale” and University of Calabria):
Fifteen years of research on gesture in Naples and elsewhere: a personal account.
Arturo Martone (University of Naples “Orientale”):
Between Voice and Gesture, the Sign: J.M. de Gérando interpreter of E.B.Condillac.
Cornelia Müller (Free University of Berlin):
Metaphors in speech and gesture: A dynamic view
Lluís Payrató (University of Barcelona):
Past and present in the research on emblems in the Hispanic tradition. Methodological considerations and future projects.
Elena Pizzuto (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) and National Research Council (CNR) - Rome):
Is Pointing "just" Pointing? Unraveling the Complexity of Indexes in Human Spoken and Signed Communication
Isabella Poggi (University of Rome III):
Gestures and beyond.
Tommaso Russo (University of Calabria):
Metaphors in Sign Languages and in co-verbal gesturing.
Jürgen Streeck (University of Texas at Austin and Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld):
Gesture and illusion: Methods of depicting the world by moving the hands.
Jocelyne Vincent (University of Naples “Orientale”):
A 'gesture' towards a (poly-)focus on links and loose ends between culture, context and communication goals, styles and modalities.

Plans for eventual publication of the proceedings are being explored.

Embodied Communication, Bielefeld, Germany

In October (October 5-8,2005) the conference "Embodied Communication" took place in Bielefeld, Germany. The conference was organized by Ipke Wachsmuth (Bielefeld) and Günter Knoblich (Newark) (website). Among the presenters were Michael Arbib, Janet Bavelas, Charles Goodwin, Adam Kendon, and David McNeill, and Wolfgang Prinz (program (pdf)).

JUNE 2005

Interacting Bodies, Lyon, France

The second conference of the ISGS "Interacting Bodies" (Corps en Interaction), organized by Lorenza Mondada, took place in Lyon, France (website). At the conference Adam Kendon was conferred Honorary Presidency of the ISGS to honor his major contribution in the field of gesture research. During the second general assembly of the ISGS a new executive board was elected and the by-laws were amended. It was also decided that Richard Ashley will be organizing the third conference of the ISGS. The conference will be held in Chicago, USA, in early summer 2007.

OCTOBER 2004

Announcement: establishment of "Gesture Centers"

As a grass-roots way of promoting and conducting the study of gesture, local Gesture Centers are beginning to emerge. The Nijmegen Gesture Center was soon followed by the Berlin Gesture Center, and soon there will be the Austin Gesture Center. These centers represent the conduct of work on gesture in a place by a kind of sign-post. It is hoped that there will be further such centers. What kind of entity of what size is indexed by the label will vary: there will be at least one or two people working on gesture; but there may be an entire division of a research institute.

Nijmegen Gesture Center
http://www.mpi.nl/world/projects/Gesture.html
(Marianne Gullberg, Asli Ozyürek)

Berlin Gesture Center
http://www.berlingesturecenter.de/
(Ellen Fricke, Hedda Lausberg, Cornelia Müller)

FEBRUARY 2004

ISGS was incorporated as a non-profit corporation in Austin/Texas and it was granted tax-exempt status by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, both in 2003.

The “McNeill Fest”, honoring David McNeill’s work on the occasion of his retirement from teaching, was celebrated at the University of Chicago in June 2003. To see the program and pictures taken at the event, click here :
http://mcneilllab.uchicago.edu/events/fest/fest.html

ISGS co-sponsored the workshop „Gestural communication in nonhuman and human primates“ during the 5th International Conference on the Evolution of Language at the Max Planck Institut für evolutionäre Anthropologie, Leizpig (Germany), March 28 - 30, which was organized by Cornelia Müller (Berlin) and Katja Liebal (Leipzig). Among the presenters were Michael Arbib, Luigia Camaioni, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Barbara King, Cornelia Müller, and Michael Tomassello. To see the full program click here:
http://email.eva.mpg.de/~liebal/gesture_workshop/index.htm