International Conference on Multimodal Interaction: ICMI 2011 Call for Papers

The information below was taken from the website for the 13th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction. I'm excited about the range of topics that the conference will cover.  I look forward to sharing more about the work of the members of this group on this blog in the future!  (I've highlighted the topics that interest me the most.)

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMODAL INTERACTION CALL FOR PAPERS

The International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2011, will take place in Alicante (Spain), November 14-18, 2011, just after the ICCV 2011 (in Barcelona, Spain). This is the thirteenth edition of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, which for the last two years joined efforts with the Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction (ICMI-MLMI 2009 and 2010). Starting in this edition the conference uses the new, shorther name.

The new ICMI is the premium international forum for multimodal signal processing and multimedia human-computer interaction. The conference will focus on theoretical and empirical foundations, varied component technologies, and combined multimodal processing techniques that define the field of multimodal interaction analysis, interface design, and system development. ICMI 2011 will feature a single-track main conference which includes: keynote speakers, technical full and short papers (including oral and poster presentations), special sessions, demonstrations, exhibits and doctoral spotlight papers. The conference will be followed by workshops. The proceedings of ICMI 2011 will be published by ACM as part of their series of International Conference Proceedings and will be also distributed to the attendees in USB memory sticks.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Multimodal and multimedia interactive processing
  Multimodal fusion, multimodal output generation, multimodal interactive discourse and dialogue modeling, machine learning methods for multimodal interaction.
  
• Multimodal input and output interfaces
  Gaze and vision-based interfaces, speech and conversational interfaces, pen-based and haptic interfaces, virtual/augmented reality interfaces, biometric interfaces, adaptive multimodal interfaces, natural user interfaces, authoring techniques, architectures.
  
• Multimodal and interactive applications
  Mobile and ubiquitous interfaces, meeting analysis and meeting spaces, interfaces to media content and entertainment, human-robot interfaces and interaction, audio/speech and vision interfaces for gaming, multimodal interaction issues in telepresence, vehicular applications and navigational aids, interfaces for intelligent environments, universal access and assistive computing, multimodal indexing, structuring and summarization.
  
• Human interaction analysis and modeling
  Modeling and analysis of multimodal human-human communication, audio-visual perception of human interaction, analysis and modeling of verbal and nonverbal interaction, cognitive modeling.
  
• Multimodal and interactive data, evaluation, and standards
  Evaluation techniques and methodologies, annotation and browsing of multimodal and interactive data, standards for multimodal interactive interfaces.
  
• Core enabling technologies
  Pattern recognition, machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition, gesture recognition.
  

Important dates

Workshops proposal	March 1, 2011
Paper and demo submission	May 13, 2011
Author notification	August 5, 2011
Camera ready deadline	September 2, 2011
Conference	November 14-16, 2011
Workshops	November 17-18, 2011

General Chairs

Hervé Bourlard (Idiap)
Thomas S. Huang (Univ. of Illinois)
Enrique Vidal (Tech. Univ. of Valencia)

Program Chairs

Daniel Gatica-Perez (Idiap)
Louis-Philippe Morency (Univ. South. California)
Nicu Sebe (Univ. of Trento)

Demo Chairs

Kazuhiro Otsuka (NTT Comm. Sci. Lab.)
Jordi Vitrià (UB/CVC, Barcelona)

Workshop Chairs

Fernando de la Torre
(Carnegie Mellon Univ.)
Alejandro Jaimes (Yahoo! Research, Barcelona)

Publication Chair

Jose Oncina (Univ. of Alicante)

Student & Doctoral Spotlight Chair

Li Deng (Microsoft Research and Univ. of Washington)

Sponsorship Chair

Nuria Oliver (Telefónica I+D)

Publicity Chair

Helen Mei-Ling Meng (CUHK, Hong Kong)

Local Organization Chair

Luisa Micó (Univ. of Alicante)

Treasurer

Jorge Calera (Univ. of Alicante)

Local organizers

Xavier Anguera (Telefónica I+D)
A. Javier Gallego Sánchez (Univ. of Alicante)
Ida Hui (CUHK, Hong Kong)
Jose Manuel Iñesta (Univ. of Alicante)
Alejandro Toselli (Tech. Univ. of Valencia)


RELATED
Accepted Papers for ICMI-MLMI 2010


NOTE:  ICMI 2011 will be held after ICCV 2011, the 13th International Conference on Computer Vision in Barcelona.

Dr. Jan Borchers' (Annotated) Top Ten List of Books on Human-Computer Interaction - Of interest to HCI students (and HCI students at heart...)

The academic year is coming up, and a new wave of students will be searching for good resources pertaining to human-computer interaction and related areas of study. A couple of months ago, I shared the following information on a blog post, but thought it was worthy of recycling.

The list is useful to HCI students, but also to people who have little background in HCI who find themselves working on real-life projects that require a good amount of this knowledge.

Dr. Jan Borchers, head of the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University, recommends the following list of books. I've read many of these books and I agree that this list is great. (The comments regarding the book are Dr. Borchers'.)

Dr. Jan Borchers' (Annotated) Top Ten List of Books on Human-Computer Interaction:

1. Alan Dix, Janet Finlay, Gregory D. Abowd, and Russell Beale: Human-Computer Interaction, 3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 2004. Currently the best, most well-rounded book I know to teach introductory HCI if you need to limit yourself to a single title. Technical enough, good breadth, not too fuzzy for a CS curriculum, very current, with a web site that includes resources such as sample programs, slides, etc.

2. Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant: Designing The User Interface, 4th ed., Pearson Addison-Wesley, 2004. Best overall reference book for all areas of HCI, providing an introduction and great up-to-date pointers to most sub-fields of HCI research and practice, especially different interaction techniques. His Golden Rules of User Interface Design and sample questionnaires for user testing are very useful in an introductory class. Unfortunately, the companion web site costs money after an initial trial period.

3. Donald A. Norman, The Design Of Everyday Things, Basic Books, 2002. A classic text from 1988 with an updated introduction that, while some of the technologies described or envisioned seem somewhat outdated now, still provides the best introduction to the spirit of good human-centered design. A not too technical read with hilarious stories of badly designed everyday technology, it provides some very useful basic models for human cognition, such as the Seven Stages of Action. This book also introduced the fundamental concept of affordances to HCI. Changed my view of the world of technology around me, and is probably the best initial brainwash for engineering students to "get" user-centered design.

4. Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers, and Helen Sharp: Interaction Design, 2nd ed., Wiley, 2007. This title focuses more on the process of designing good user interfaces, and is less technical, but excellent and up-to-date in the area it addresses. The companion web site has slides, case studies, and other materials.

5. Bill Moggridge, Designing Interactions, MIT Press, 2008. A truly beautiful "coffee-table style" book on interaction design, also covering product and industrial design of digital technology (Moggridge is a founder of IDEO). It has wonderful short essays about seminal digial product designs, from Engelbart's mouse, to the Mac and Palm, to Google and other internet services, as well as articles on digital product design theory. My own Sweet Sports and Baroque Technology article was based on one of the theory articles. Special treat: video interviews and chapters are available for free, on a weekly rotation, at http://www.designinginteractions.com/.

6. Bill Buxton, Sketching User Experiences, Elsevier, 2007. Similar to Moggridge's book in style, this book focuses on the early stages of product design. It also includes very interesting stories of key interactive products, such as Apple's iPod. And of course it's written by one of the long-time key players in HCI. More at http://www.billbuxton.com/.

7. Terry Winograd (ed.): Bringing Design to Software, Addison-Wesley, 1996. An excellent and very well edited collection of contributions from key players in HCI, from Kapor's Software Design Manifesto to Rheinfrank's Design Languages. Its particular value also comes from the profiles that link chapters and give an insider's view of how some of the most seminal UI designs came to be, from the Xerox Star to VisiCalc and HyperCard. Terry has some information about his book at http://hci.stanford.edu/bds/, and I used it with great success when I had the fortunate opportunity to teach an introductory HCI class in his program at Stanford in 2002.

8. Brenda Laurel (ed.): The Art of Human-Computer Interaction, Addison-Wesley, 1990. While ancient by today's standards, this book is another carefully compiled and very coherent collection of highly relevant articles on HCI by some of the most influential people in the field. I particularly like the article by Scott Kim on interdisciplinary design, and Tom Erickson's chapter.

9. Apple Computer: The Apple Software Design Guidelines, latest edition 2005. OK, I'm a Mac head, but then many HCI people are because Apple has such an excellent sense of doing the right thing when it comes to user interface design. These guidelines have been around since the 90's, with several new editions since then, and especially Part I ("Application Design Fundamentals") contains excellent, system-independent, hands-on advice for anybody developing interactive software, especially desktop applications. And it's free! Apple's developer website has the latest version both online and as downloadable PDF. I often recommend this as a quick read for engineering types that just want the bare essentials to help avoid major UI design catastrophes.

10. Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface, Addison-Wesley, 2000. Similar to Norman's book above, but more recent and more technical, this is another good first read to start thinking about user interface design, written by the father of the original Apple Macintosh. Some of the ideas presented here are quite unusual, and that's intended. Some related materials, such as demos of his Zoomable User Interface and The Humane Environment are at http://www.jefraskin.com/.

"So that's my top 10 list. I may add some more in the future. But I figure it's more important to restrict myself to those books I think are really outstanding than bother you with additional titles that don't really have that special something....For a good current PhD-level HCI reading list that is based more on papers and individual chapters than single books, see Terry Winograd's HCI reading list at Stanford University." -Dr. Jan Borchers


While you are at it, Dr. Borchers has a list of HCI hardware toolkits for physical user interface prototyping.

(I want to take more HCI classes and play with this stuff!)

Usability, Accessibility, and User Experience in a Win7 Environment

Microsoft's newest operating system, Win7 (beta), allows for multi-touch interaction and application development. From what I can tell from the news from the Consumer Electronic Show (CES 2009), touch and gesture interaction holds quite a bit of interest among consumers and application developers alike.

Hopefully people will think carefully about user experience and usability factors when developing the applications we'll be using in the not too distant future!

Because of my background as a school psychologist, I’m interested how touch/gesture applications can address accessibility and universal usability issues.

I wasn't able to locate user experience or usability information for Win7. Here are a few links from the Microsoft website that I think are worth reading:

Touch Interaction Guidelines

How to Design a Great User Experience

Designing with Windows Presentation Foundation

Accessibility

According to the research from Microsoft, ”more than half of all computer users experience difficulties or impairments related to accessibility, and are likely to benefit from the use of accessible technology. Moreover, approaching software design with the flexibility and inclusiveness that are the hallmarks of accessibility often results in overall improved usability and customer satisfaction.”

Regarding touch/gesture interaction, know that “19% (24.4 million) of computer users have a mild dexterity difficulty or impairment, and 5% (6.8 million) of computer users have a severe dexterity difficulty or impairment.”

Christian Moore, from the NUI-Group, shared this nice graphic that depicts the various fields that intersect or converge with interface design, which I think is useful when thinking about how we will design, develop, and use emerging technologies:



Concepts such as accessibility and universal usability can fit into this design!

For more information regarding multi-touch, see my previous post, "For Techies and the Tech-Curious: Multi-touch/Gesture from the NUI Group"

Oculusia, an Interactive Multi-Touch Table Game for Four People

The following video is a nice demonstration of a multi-touch table game, Oculusia. The game was created by four students from the Aalborg University, Copenhagen, for Medialogy 2008. The students, Jens Fursund, Thomas Frohlich, Thomas Miksa, and Tobias Brogaard, also created the table.



More Information:
Students Explore Multi-touch with Oculusia

Related:
The "Workbench" used in the Medialogy Lab at Aalborg University, Copenhagen:


"The Workbench displays 3D stereo images and the tracking system allows for interaction with virtual objects on the display surface. The tracking system uses infrared light to illuminate the display surface and the camera is only sensitive to infrared light. Basic image processing techniques are then applied to acquire position of the hand."

A Multi-Touch DigitalPainting Application pdf (Søren Støvlbæk, Larsen Gavin, Francis Murray & Jesper Højgaard Pedersen:Institute of Electonic Systems, Computer Vision, and Graphics, Aalborg University 2007)

The ReacTable: A Tangible Musical Instrument pdf(Martin Kaltenbrunner, Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2006)