Benjamin R. Cowan

Author directory

2026

The ARTICULATE project is an ambitious and interdisciplinary initiative funded by the CHIST-ERA call 2025. Its vision is to revolutionize science education and democratize scientific knowledge beyond academia and English-speaking audiences through the integration of AI with self-regulated learning. The aim is to translate science not just across language but across language style, to create engaging spoken digital experiences. We present an introduction to this project, an overview of the consortium and research approach, and a number of expected impacts.

2022

We present RoomReader, a corpus of multimodal, multiparty conversational interactions in which participants followed a collaborative student-tutor scenario designed to elicit spontaneous speech. The corpus was developed within the wider RoomReader Project to explore multimodal cues of conversational engagement and behavioural aspects of collaborative interaction in online environments. However, the corpus can be used to study a wide range of phenomena in online multimodal interaction. The publicly-shared corpus consists of over 8 hours of video and audio recordings from 118 participants in 30 gender-balanced sessions, in the “in-the-wild” online environment of Zoom. The recordings have been edited, synchronised, and fully transcribed. Student participants have been continuously annotated for engagement with a novel continuous scale. We provide questionnaires measuring engagement and group cohesion collected from the annotators, tutors and participants themselves. We also make a range of accompanying data available such as personality tests and behavioural assessments. The dataset and accompanying psychometrics present a rich resource enabling the exploration of a range of downstream tasks across diverse fields including linguistics and artificial intelligence. This could include the automatic detection of student engagement, analysis of group interaction and collaboration in online conversation, and the analysis of conversational behaviours in an online setting.

2017