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H2020Doctoral network2020–2024

COBRA · COnversational BRAins

Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2020-02-01 → 2024-07-31
EU contribution
€4,009,380
Participants
9
Scheme
MSCA-ITN

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners. CORDIS does not always give exact coordinates for projects before 2014. These points are placed at city or country level.

Results in brief

COnversational BRAins

COBRA aimed to train the next generation of researchers to accurately characterize and model the linguistic, cognitive, and brain mechanisms deployed by human speakers during conversational interactions with both human interlocutors and artificial dialogue systems. It relied on a cross-sectoral international network of 11 world-class academic research centers and 4 non-academic partners, including 3 fast-growing SMEs and 1 global company. The unique combination of expertise and strong complementarity among the partners enabled COBRA to offer 15 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) an excellent training program, along with significant exposure to the non-academic sector in the emerging field of conversational neuroscience.The training covered scientific and technical skills, ranging from the joint monitoring of brain and physiological activities in two or more people conversing, to creating multilingual databases, resources, and tools made available in open access. It also included the development of transferable skills. The ESRs conducted experimental and corpus studies on the alignment and prediction processes that make conversations between people both easy and fluent, across a wide variety of communication settings and languages. This work contributed to a deeper understanding of how these processes help establish brain-to-brain coupling relationships. Collaborative efforts with non-academic partners fostered the development of more effective and socially acceptable text-to-speech synthesizers, artificial dialogue systems, and social humanoid robots with high-level conversational abilities. The project opened new career opportunities for the ESRs, providing interdisciplinary training in language sciences, neuroscience, and dialogue systems within a rapidly growing digital market. COBRA's training program also had significant societal implications, addressing aspects of European citizens' everyday lives, from spoken interactions with machines to conversations in non-native languages.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

COBRA aims to train the next generation of researchers to accurately characterize and model the linguistic, cognitive and brain mechanisms deployed by human speakers in conversational interactions with human interlocutors as well as artificial dialog systems. It relies on a cross-sectoral international network of 11 world-level academic research centers and 4 non-academic partners with 3 fast-developing SMEs and 1 world-level company. The partners' unique combined expertise and high complementarity will allow COBRA to offer 15 ESRs an excellent training programme as well as strong exposure to the non-academic sector in the emerging field of conversational brains. Training will cover scientific and technical skills, from the joint monitoring of brain and physiological activities in two or more people talking to each other to making multi-language databases, resources and findings available in open access, as well as transferable skills. The ESRs will conduct experimental and corpus studies on the alignment and prediction processes that make conversation between people both easy and fluent, across a large variety of communicational settings and in different languages, to better understand how these processes contribute to setting up brain-to-brain coupling relationships. Collaborative work with non-academic partners will foster the development of more effective and socially acceptable text-to-speech synthesizers, artificial dialogue systems, and social humanoid robots with high-level conversational skills. The project will open new career perspectives for ESRs with interdisciplinary training in language sciences, neuroscience and dialog systems on a very fast-growing digital market. COBRA’s training programme will also have major societal implications as it will concern aspects of the European citizens’ everyday life, from spoken interactions with machines to conversing in a non-native language.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • UNIVERSITE D'AIX MARSEILLE · MarseilleCoordinatorFrance
  • FONDAZIONE ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI TECNOLOGIA · GenovaItaly
  • FREIE UNIVERSITAET BERLIN · BerlinGermany
  • FURHAT ROBOTICS AB · StockholmSweden
  • HUMBOLDT-UNIVERSITAET ZU BERLIN · BerlinGermany
  • READSPEAKER BV · Huis Ter HeideCountry levelNetherlands
  • THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH · EdinburghUnited Kingdom
  • UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN · LOUVAIN LA NEUVEBelgium
  • USTAV INFORMATIKY SLOVENSKEJ AKADEMIE VIED, VEREJNA VYSKUMNA INSTITUCIA · BratislavaSlovakia

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union