ICMI-MLMI

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Ninth International Conference on Multimodal Inter-faces (ICMI 2007) held on 12-15 November in Nagoya, JAPAN. ICMI 2007 is sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Multimodal interfaces represent an emerging interdisciplinary research direction, involving interactive system design, computer human interaction, spoken language understanding, gesture and emotion recognition, computer vision, pattern recognition, context processing, experimental psychology, etc. Research in multimodal interfaces aims at efficient, convenient and natural interaction between com-puters and human users. Multimodal interfaces will one day enable humans to interact with computers in various shapes such as robots, meeting rooms, mobile phones, and automobiles using everyday skills. Computers and their interfaces will be able to inhabit everywhere in a multimodal symbiosis with humans.

The ICMI 2007 program consists of three days of technical sessions with oral paper presentations, poster presentations, demonstrations, doctoral spotlight posters, and three keynote speeches by Yuri Ivanov of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory (MERL), Norihiro Hagita of Advanced Telecom-munications Research Institute International (ATR), and Dominic Massaro of University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). ICMI 2007 also hosts three workshops on Multimodal Interfaces in Semantic Interaction Tagging, Mining and Retrieval of Human Related Activity Information, and Massive Datasets on November 15. The CD proceedings include the oral and poster papers, the abstracts of keynote speeches and introductions to the workshops. All of the materials including workshop papers will be published through the ACM's Digital Library.

There were 99 total submissions in the regular (long and short) paper category. The review process involved a double blind-review with a minimum of three reviewers, and a meta-review by the relevant area-chair. The program committee (PC) consisted of 14 area chairs who are leading researchers in different aspects of multimodal interfaces. The final paper selection was done at a meeting of the area chairs and program chairs at the MIT Media Laboratory. This process led to the selection of 18 papers for oral presentation, 36 papers for poster presentation. The demonstrations were selected by the Demo chair and the Doctoral Spotlights were selected by the Program Co-Chairs. As a result, 5 demonstrations and 2 doctoral student posters will be presented during the conference.