The capability to convert thoughts into speech, mimic or gesture is a human feature. Thereby people transform unconventional content (thoughts) into conventional form (speech, mimic or gestures) and communicate efficiently and effectively about any subject using dialogues. Although today, systems exists which are able to give intelligent answers, they cannot achieve the same levels of communicativeness as their human dialogue partners: spontaneous speech input is still a big challenge for speech recognition engines due to their vocabulary limitation and task orientation; on the other side gestures and mimic are in many cases even more difficult to recognize and interpret than speech. However even if a multimodal dialogue system cannot compete with a human dialog partner there are several design aspects to be taken into account in order to enhance its flexibility and naturalness. How these aspects relate to each other, what components they have and in which degree they represent a guarantee for future conversational quality assessments will try to respond my research work.

A.I. Niculescu, E.M.A.G. van Dijk, A. Nijholt, D.K. Limbu, Swee Lan See and Alvin Hong Yee Wong (2010) Socializing with Olivia, the Youngest Robot Receptionist Outside the Lab , in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2010, S.S. Ge, H. Li, J.-J. Cabibihan and Y.K. Tan (eds), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, volume 6414, Springer Verlag, Berlin, ISBN 978-3-642-17247-2, pp. 50-62, 2010

A.I. Niculescu, D.H.W. Hofs, E.M.A.G. van Dijk and A. Nijholt 2010 How the agent’s gender influence users’ evaluation of a QA system, in Proceedings of the International Conference on User Science and Engineering 2010, volume online pre-publi, IEEE, USA, ISBN 978-1-4244-9047-9, pp. 5-9, 2010

A.I. Niculescu, Y. Cao and A. Nijholt (2010). Manipulating Stress and Cognitive Load in Conversational Interactions with a Multimodal System for Crisis Management Support, in Development of Multimodal Interfaces: Active Listening and Synchrony, A. Esposito, N. Campbell, C. Vogel, A. Husain and A. Nijholt (eds), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 5967, Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, ISBN 978-3-642-12396-2, ISSN 0302-9743, pp. 134-148, 2010

A.I. Niculescu, E.M.A.G. van Dijk, Y. Cao and A. Nijholt (2010). Measuring stress and cognitive load effects on the perceived quality of a multimodal dialogue system, in Proceedings 7th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research: Measuring Behavior 2010, A.J. Spink, F. Grieco, O.E. Krips, L.W.S. Loyens, L.P.J.J. Noldus and P.H. Zimmerman (eds), Noldus Information Technology, Wageningen, ISBN 978-90-74821-86-5, pp. 453-455, 2010

Niculescu, A.I. and van Dijk, E.M.A.G. and Nijholt, A. and See, Swee Lan and Li, Haizhou (2010). How humans behave and evaluate a social robot in real-environment settings. In: Proceedings of ECCE 2010, 25-27 Aug 2010, Delft, The Netherlands. pp. 351-352. Mediamatica. ISBN 978-94-90818-04-3

A. Niculescu, F. van den Sluis and A.Nijholt (2009). Feminity, masculinity and androgyny: how humans perceive the gender of anthropomorphic agents. In: Proceedings of 13th. International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, C. Stephanides (eds), Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, ISBN 978-3-642-02884-7, pp. 628-632, 2009

A.I. Niculescu, Y.Cao and A.Nijholt (2009). Stress and cognitive load in multimodal conversational interactions. In: Proceedings of 13th. International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, C. Stephanides (eds), Springer Verlag, Heidelberg, ISBN 978-3-642-02884-7, pp. 891-895, 2009.

A. I. Niculescu (2008). Affordances in conversational interactions with multimodal QA systems , in Proceedings of the 4th Symposium of the Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering of the Austrian Computer Society , USAB 2008, A. Holzinger (eds), LNCS, volume 5298/2008, Springer Verlag, Germany, ISBN 978-3-540-89349-3, ISSN 0302-9743, pp. 221-236.

A. I. Niculescu, G.M. White, S.S. Lan, R.U. Waloejo and Y. Kawaguchi (2008). Impact of English Regional Accents on User Acceptance of Voice User Interfaces , in Proceedings of the 5th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, NordiCHI 2008, volume 358, ACM, New York, ISBN 978-1-59593-704-9, pp. 523-526,

A.I. Niculescu and F.M.G. de Jong (2008). Development of a speech recognition system for Spanish broadcast news. Technical Report, TR-CTIT-08-18, Enschede, Centre for Telematics and Information Technology, University of Twente.

Originally, I come from Bucharest (Romania) once called Little Paris. I have a Bachelor degree in Computer Science and a Master degree in Communication both from the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany).

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