Events & Progress
- August 25-26 2006 STANDUP is organizing a 2-day Workshop on Language Play and Computers.
- 29 July-5 August 2006 Dr. Annalu Waller and Mr. Rolf Black attended the ISAAC 2006 conference in Düsseldorf, Germany, where they presented two papers.
- 3-6 July 2006 Dr. Graeme Ritchie attended the 18th International ISHS Humor Conference, which took place at the Danish University of Education (Danmarks Paedagogiske Universitet, DPU) in Copenhagen. Dr. Ritchie gave a presentation on STANDUP, including a demonstration of the software.
- Summer 2006 The STANDUP software is being evaluated at Capability Scotland's Corseford School, Renfrewshire.
- May 24-26 2006 Dr. Ruli Manurung attended LREC 2006 in Genoa, presenting a poster and paper titled "Building a Lexical Database for an Interactive Joke-Generator".
- July 22-27 2005 Dr. Dave O’Mara attended HCII 2005 in Las Vegas, presenting a paper titled "Facilitating user feedback in the design of a novel joke generation system for people with severe communication impairment"
- April 28 2005 Dr. Dave O’Mara and Dr. Ruli Manurung were invited to speak at the AAC Special Interest Group Seminar in Perth. The talk presented some background to the STANDUP project, and concentrated on the recently developed mockup implementation and the early evaluation studies conducted.
- April 2005 A complete working "mockup" for the first version of the STANDUP software has been implemented. It is intended to test the design and usability of the user interface. Dr. Dave O’Mara and Dr. Ruli Manurung will shortly be carrying out initial evaluation studies with domain experts and end users across Scotland.
- February 2005 The first version of the STANDUP "backend", i.e. joke generation component, has been implemented. At the core of this component is an SQL database containing most of the lexical resources needed for joke generation. This database is generated by combining existing freely available lexical resources such as the Unisyn phonetic dictionary and WordNet, a widely used lexical semantics database.
- October 21st: Dr. Dave O’Mara was invited to be the guest speaker by the Dundee section of the British Federation of Women Graduates. The talk lasted around an hour and fifteen minutes and presented the background to why we think humour and joke generation can help children with language impairment improve their language and communication skills.
- October 6th-10th: Dr. Dave O'Mara presented a paper titled "The Role of Assisted Communicators as Domain Experts in Early Software Design" at the ISAAC 2004 conference in Natal, Brazil.
- September 23rd: Dr. Graeme Ritchie gave a talk in the seminar series of the Department of Computing at the Open University, entitled "Computational Modelling of Verbal Humour". He included mention of the STANDUP project.
- September 6th - 11th 2004: Dr. Graeme Ritchie participated in the 4th International Summer School on Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications, at the University of Wolverhampton, giving three lectures. He included mention of the STANDUP project.
- August 1st 2004: Dr. Graeme Ritchie left the University of Edinburgh and joined the Natural Language Generation group in the Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, as a Senior Research Fellow.
- January 2004: Abstracts submitted to ISHS 2004 and ISAAC 2004 conferences.
- October 2003: Project commences. Research assistants Dave O'Mara and Ruli Manurung take up posts.