Publications

The concept of the audience is changing. In the twenty-first century there are novel configurations of user practices and technological capabilities that are altering the way we understand and trust media organizations and representations, how we participate in society, and how we construct our social relations. This book embeds these transformations in a societal, cultural, technological, ideological, economic and historical context, avoiding a naive privileging of technology as the main societal driving force, but also avoiding the media-centric reduction of society to the audiences that are situated within. Audience Transformations provides a platform for a nuanced and careful analysis of the main changes in European communicational practices, and their social, cultural and technological affordances.

This volume brings together the advanced research results obtained by the European COST Action 2102 “Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication”, primarily discussed at the PINK SSPnet-COST2102 International Conference on Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issues, held in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2010.

The main focus of the conference was on methods to combine and build up knowledge through verbal and nonverbal signals enacted in an environment and in a context. In previous meetings, COST 2102 focused on the importance of uncovering and exploiting the wealth of information conveyed by multimodal signals. The next steps have been to analyze actions performed in response to multimodal signals and to study how these actions are organized in a realistic and socially believable context. The focus was on processing issues, since the new approach is computationally complex and the amount of data to be treated may be considered algorithmically infeasible. Therefore, data processing for gainingenactive

knowledge must account for natural and intuitive approaches, based more on heuristics and experiences rather than on symbols, as well as on the discovery of new processing possibilities that account for new approaches for data analysis, coordination of the data flow through synchronization and temporal organization and optimization of the extracted features.