The automotive group at DFKI cultivates the tradition of scientific exchange by inviting and accommoding visiting researchers.

From April to July 2009, Yujia Cao visited us. Yujia is a PhD student at the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente (Enschede, the Netherlands). Her research topic is cognitive-aware multimodal information presentation, focusing on the design of multimodal presentations that can be more efficiently perceived and processed by the human cognitive systems. In cooperation with other automotive group members, she designed and conducted a user experiment investigating how local danger warnings can be better presented to drivers.

In June 2009, we had the pleasure to welcome Prof. Etienne Barnard, who is the research leader of the Human Language Technologies (HLT) group at MERAKA, the African Advanced Institute for Information and Communication Technology in Pretoria (South Africa). His research interests are inter alia statistical approaches to speech recognition. His and the automotive group's joined effort are centered around improving speaker classification techniques, which is a central working package of the CARMINA project.