Student Participant Support for International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces 2007; November 12-15, 2007 in Nagoya, Japan

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support attendance by approximately 10 graduate students in a doctoral consortium (workshop) to be held in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI07), which will take place November 12-15, 2007, in Nagoya, Japan, and is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ICMI is the foremost conference representing the growing interest in next-generation perceptive, adaptive and multimodal user interfaces, systems, and applications, which are especially well-suited for interpreting natural communication and activity patterns in real-world environments. The emergence of these new interfaces, systems and applications represents a radical departure from previous computing, and is rapidly transforming the nature of human-computer interaction by creating more natural, expressively powerful, flexible and robust means of interacting with computers. The theme of this year's conference is once again multimodal collaboration through different platforms and applications. The conference will focus on major trends and challenges in this area, including distilling the development of a roadmap for future research and commercial success. New topics of interest this year include multimodal applications in the vehicular environment, human-robot interfaces, and interfaces for music and amusements. The 4-day event will bring together researchers from academia and industry from around the world to present and discuss the latest multi-disciplinary work in the field. The invited talks, panels, single-track oral and poster presentations will facilitate interaction and discussion among researchers. Participants in the doctoral consortium will get to showcase their ongoing thesis work, either orally or via posters, in a special "spotlight session" during which they will receive feedback from an invited committee composed of approximately half a dozen senior personnel (including the conference General and Program Chairs). As in previous years, students funded under this award will all be U.S. residents enrolled at U.S. institutions of higher education. Additional information about the ICMI07 conference is available at http://www.acm.org/icmi/2007. Broader Impacts: The doctoral consortium will give students exposure to their new research community, both by presenting their own work and by observing and interacting with established professionals in the field. It will encourage students at this critical time in their careers to begin building a social support network of peers and mentors. Participants will be selected with the goal of increasing the breadth of participation at ICMI, with priority given first to minority students, female students, students from geographically under-represented states, and finally to students whose advisors or departments have insufficient funds to otherwise support their participation in ICMI.