This volume brings together the peer-reviewed contributions of the participants at the COST 2102 International Conference on “Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures, Gaze and Facial Expressions” held in Prague, Czech Republic, October 15–18, 2008.

Emotions and ICT.- Cross-Fertilization between Studies on ICT Practices of Use and Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication.- Theories without Heart.- Prosodic Characteristics and Emotional Meanings of Slovak Hot-Spot Words.- Affiliations, Emotion and the Mobile Phone.- Polish Emotional Speech Database – Recording and Preliminary Validation.- Towards a Framework of Critical Multimodal Analysis: Emotion in a Film Trailer.- Biosignal Based Emotion Analysis of Human-Agent Interactions.- Emotional Aspects in User Experience with Interactive Digital Television: A Case Study on Dyslexia Rehabilitation.- Investigation of Normalised Time of Increasing Vocal Fold Contact as a Discriminator of Emotional Voice Type.- Evaluation of Speech Emotion Classification Based on GMM and Data Fusion.- Spectral Flatness Analysis for Emotional Speech Synthesis and Transformation.- Verbal and Nonverbal Features of Computational Phonetics.- Voice Pleasantness of Female Voices and the Assessment of Physical Characteristics.- Technical and Phonetic Aspects of Speech Quality Assessment: The Case of Prosody Synthesis.- Syntactic Doubling: Some Data on Tuscan Italian.- Perception of Czech in Noise: Stability of Vowels.- Challenges in Segmenting the Czech Lateral Liquid.- Implications of Acoustic Variation for the Segmentation of the Czech Trill /r/.- Voicing in Labial Plosives in Czech.- Normalization of the Vocalic Space.- Algorithmic and Theoretical Analysis of Multimodal Interfaces.- Gaze Behaviors for Virtual Crowd Characters.- Gestural Abstraction and Restatement: From Iconicity to Metaphor.- Preliminary Prosodic and Gestural Characteristics of Instructing Acts in Polish Task-Oriented Dialogues.- Polish Children’s Gesticulation in Narrating (Re-telling) a Cartoon.-Prediction of Learning Abilities Based on a Cross-Modal Evaluation of Non-verbal Mental Attributes Using Video-Game-Like Interfaces.- Automatic Sentence Modality Recognition in Children’s Speech, and Its Usage Potential in the Speech Therapy.- Supporting Engagement and Floor Control in Hybrid Meetings.- Behavioral Consistency Extraction for Face Verification.- Protecting Face Biometric DCT Templates by Means of Pseudo-random Permutations.- Facial Expressions Recognition from Image Sequences.- Czech Artificial Computerized Talking Head George.- An Investigation into Audiovisual Speech Correlation in Reverberant Noisy Environments.- Articulatory Speech Re-synthesis: Profiting from Natural Acoustic Speech Data.- A Blind Source Separation Based Approach for Speech Enhancement in Noisy and Reverberant Environment.- Quantitative Analysis of the Relative Local Speech Rate.- Czech Spontaneous Speech Collection and Annotation: The Database of Technical Lectures.- BSSGUI – A Package for Interactive Control of Blind Source Separation Algorithms in MATLAB.- Accuracy Analysis of Generalized Pronunciation Variant Selection in ASR Systems.- Analysis of the Possibilities to Adapt the Foreign Language Speech Recognition Engines for the Lithuanian Spoken Commands Recognition.- MLLR Transforms Based Speaker Recognition in Broadcast Streams.

This book constitutes the peer-reviewed post-conference proceedings of the Second COST Action 2102 International Conference on Cross-Modal Analysis of Speech, Gestures,Gaze and Facial Expressions held in Prague, Czech Republic during October 15-18, 2008. The 39 peer-reviewed papers presented are organized in three sections. The first section “Emotion and ICT,” deals with themes related to the crossfertilization between studies on ICT practices of use and cross-modal analysis of verbal and nonverbal communication. The second section, “Verbal and Nonverbal Features of Computational Phonetics,” presents original studies devoted to the modelling of verbal and nonverbal phonetics. The third section, “Algorithmic and Theoretical Analysis of Multimodal Interfaces,” presents theoretical and practical implementations of original studies devoted to the analysis of speech, gestures, face and head movements as well as to learning issues in human–computer interaction and to algorithmic solutions for noise environments in human–machine exchanges.