photo opportunity 2pm, Wednesday 30th April, Jam Factory, University of Dundee. Prototypes of projects will be available for photographs.
Final year students of Applied Computing at the University of Dundee will demonstrate their projects and innovations, including interactive story boards for children and the addition of emotion to speech synthesis, on Wednesday 30th April. The projects are the culmination of their four years of study.
Claire Jones has created a story making application on a personal digital assistant (PDA) to be used by children to produce stories in the classroom. The new invention encourages group work, reinforces work taught in class and is fun for the children to use.
The application was designed by children for use by children of the age group seven to ten. At each stage of the design and production a group of children of primary five age were asked to test the software to see if they liked it - their suggestions were then built into the next version.
Stuart Anderson has worked to improve the naturalness of the Festival speech synthesiser by adding emotion to the speech produced. The emotion is applied automatically using a series of rules, each of which alter the speech in a different way. Manual editing of the speech waveforms was performed in an effort to improve the emotional effects.
The level of recognition of the emotional speech was evaluated by a listening experiment which proved that it is possible to add emotional effects to the Festival speech synthesiser that can be recognised by listeners who have not heard synthetic speech before.
The facility to produce highly natural synthetic speech is beneficial for many applications of synthetic speech, such as automated telephone systems and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). Stuart attended Baldragon Academy in Dundee.
Alex Gibson has produced a Virtual Interactive Learning Environment that students use to access lecture notes and keep up to date with course materials. He has called VILE! It features:
Alex attended Beath High School in Fife.
Other projects include an image segmentation system, an online citation manager, a multi-lingual web site, a graphical interface for a planetary surface simulator, and a startracker.
By Jenny Marra, Head of Press 01382 344910 j.m.marra@dundee.ac.uk