ICMI-MLMI

Welcome to Alicante and to the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2011. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. It is the fusion of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and the Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction which, for the last two years, held a combined event under the name ICMIMLMI. Starting in this thirteenth edition the combined conference uses the new, shorter name.

This year we had the largest number of submissions ever achieved in ICMI/MLMI: 127 papers, 4 Special Session proposals, 10 Demonstration papers and 6 Workshop proposals. From the 4 Special Session proposals 2 were selected, including 7 papers. Out of the 120 regular papers submitted, 47 were accepted for oral or poster presentation, bringing the conference acceptance rate to 39%. This rate was higher for the Demonstration papers, from which 7 were accepted. In addition, the program includes three invited Keynote talks. Finally, from the 6 post-conference workshop proposals, 4 were selected, centered on hot specific topics of multi-modal interaction.

The review process was organized using the PCS submission and review system, which ICMI has used in the past. Aiming at improving the quality of the finally accepted papers, for the first time, this year the review process included a rebuttal step. The process was assisted by 15 Area Chairs (ACs) who helped the Program Chairs in defining the Program Committee. The papers were allocated to ACs in areas of their expertise according to the indications of the submitters, and then checked for conflicts. The Program Chairs distributed the papers to members of program committee and volunteer reviewers for comments. Once reviews were submitted, the ACs provided meta-reviews for all papers which were sent to the authors for rebuttal consideration. After hearing the authors' arguments, the scores of the papers were then collected and tabulated. All reviews and papers were then again checked by the Program Chairs, and papers with highly varying scores received an additional round of reviews. All papers and their reviews were finally discussed by the Program Chairs on a two-day remote meeting in order to decide on the list of accepted submissions.

The program was formed by grouping papers into main topics of interest for this year's conference. Following the trend in previous ICMI-MLMI events and many other academic meetings, to minimize paper consumption we decided to distribute the conference proceedings on USB Flash Drives. This year we have selected 5 top scoring papers as candidates for two awards: Outstanding Student Paper, and Outstanding Paper. An anonymous committee has been appointed by Program Chairs to select the two awarded papers. You will find the nominated papers in the conference program marked with special symbol. The final award decisions will be announced at the conference banquet.

As in previous events, ICMI-2011 has been organized with the support of ACM and SIGCHI. In addition, despite the financial crisis, many sponsors have given support to the event. A significant amount of funds has been provided by the Spanish "Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación" (MICINN) and by several academic organizations of the Valencia Community: "Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia" (UPV), "Universidad de Alicante" (UA), the "Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación" (DSIC-UPV), the "Escola Técnica Superior d'Enginyeria Informática" (ETSINFUPV), the "Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos" (LSI-UA) and the "Institut Universitari de Investigació Informatica" (IUII-UA). On the other hand, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has generously provided us with travel and housing support for several students to help offset pressure on academic travel budgets. Two academic projects have also contributed to the conference organization: The Spanish "Multimodal Interaction in Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision" (MIPRCV) and the European "Social games for conflIct REsolution based on natural iNteraction" (SIREN). In addition, we thank the European network of excellence on "Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modeling, and Computational Learning" (PASCAL 2) for partially supporting travel expenses of keynote speakers and students and the "Asociación Española de Reconocimiento de Formas y Análisis de Imágenes" (AERFAI) for supporting ICMI-2011 registration expenses for its members. Even in these difficult times, important companies affirmed their support to the multimodal interaction and interface research community by providing ICMI with a reasonable level of financial support. These organizations deserve our warmest gratitude: Telefonica I+D, Microsoft Research and AT&T. Without the generous support of all these sponsors, this meeting would not have been possible.