The Research Group on Media Technologies (GTM) aims at a more natural interaction between human beings, machines and their environment, through the research in the fields of Acoustics, Signal processing and Interaction.
Human-computer interaction (HCI) comprises an input (human to machine) and an output (machine to human) channel. As for the former, we work on speech and speaker recognition, the analysis of gestures and expressions on different modalities (image, voice, text, and their combination), and the identification of audio events to adapt the interaction to the environment and the user. Moreover, we investigate on vibroacoustics and architectural acoustics to guarantee the acoustic comfort and intelligibility in the context of interaction.
Regarding the output channel, we focus on the generation of voice by numerically simulating its underlying physics, and by resorting to speech synthesis approaches as well (text-to-speech and voice transformation). Also we develop virtual characters (avatars) with natural movements (animations from MoCap), and work on the analysis and organization of multimedia data.
In what concerns HCI interfaces, we inspect new paradigms of interaction through smart objects, human-robot interaction (HRI), and emphatic user experience (UX). Finally, we also investigate on parametric array technology to generate audible sound from non-linear propagation of modulated ultrasonic beams.
Our research finds several domains of application, such as (from RIS3CAT) sustainable mobility (e.g., Smart Cities, connected car, IoT, etc.), health industries (e.g. tele-assistance, social robotics, applications for aged and disabled), experience-based cultural industries (e.g., videogames, creative industries, cultural heritage, etc.).
The GTM collaborates with researchers from reference centers around the world, such as KTH (Sweden), GIPSA-Lab (CNRS) and INSA Lyon (France), BICOCCA (Italy), University of British Columbia (Canada), MIT Media Lab (USA), University of Crete (Greece), etc.
The Research Group on Media Technologies has been recognized as a Research Group by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government) in the framework of the 2017 SGR Call (2017 SGR 966). We have also been recognized as a member of the tech-transfer TECNIO Developers by ACCIÓ, the Agency for Business Competitiveness of the Catalan Government.
