Analysis of Gesture -- The Role of Iconic Gestures in Production and Comprehension of Language: Evidence from Brain and Behavior -- Speakers’ Use of Interactive Gestures as Markers of Common Ground -- Gesture Space and Gesture Choreography in European Portuguese and African Portuguese Interactions: A Pilot Study of Two Cases -- Concepts of Gesture -- The Embodied Morphemes of Gaze -- On Factoring Out a Gesture Typology from the Bielefeld Speech-and-Gesture-Alignment Corpus (SAGA) -- Function and Form of Gestures in a Collaborative Design Meeting -- Gesture Recognition -- Continuous Realtime Gesture Following and Recognition -- Multiscale Detection of Gesture Patterns in Continuous Motion Trajectories -- Recognition of Gesture Sequences in Real-Time Flow, Context of Virtual Theater -- Deictic Gestures with a Time-of-Flight Camera -- Gesture Processing -- Towards Analysis of Expressive Gesture in Groups of Users: Computational Models of Expressive Social Interaction -- On Gestural Variation and Coarticulation Effects in Sound Control -- Gesture Saliency: A Context-Aware Analysis -- Towards a Gesture-Sound Cross-Modal Analysis -- Methods for Effective Sonification of Clarinetists’ Ancillary Gestures -- Gesture Simulation -- Systematicity and Idiosyncrasy in Iconic Gesture Use: Empirical Analysis and Computational Modeling -- To Beat or Not to Beat: Beat Gestures in Direction Giving -- Requirements for a Gesture Specification Language -- Statistical Gesture Models for 3D Motion Capture from a Library of Gestures with Variants -- Modeling Joint Synergies to Synthesize Realistic Movements -- Gesture and Multimodal Interfaces -- Multimodal Interfaces in Support of Human-Human Interaction -- Gestures for Large Display Control -- Gestural Attributions as Semantics in User Interface Sound Design -- Gestural Interfaces for Elderly Users: Help or Hindrance? -- Gestures in Human-Computer Interaction – Just Another Modality? -- Sign Language -- Body Posture Estimation in Sign Language Videos -- Influence of Handshape Information on Automatic Sign Language Recognition -- Towards Interactive Web-Based Virtual Signers: First Step, a Platform for Experimentation Design -- Toward Modeling Sign Language Coarticulation.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Gesture in Embodied Communication and Human-Computer Interaction, GW 2009, held in Bielefeld, Germany, February 2009.