This is funding to support attendance by approximately 10 graduate students in a Doctoral Spotlight (workshop) to be held in conjunction with the Tenth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2008), which will take place October 20-22, 2008, in Chania, Greece, and is organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) with co-sponsorship from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). ICMI is the foremost conference representing the growing interest in next-generation perceptive, adaptive and multimodal user interfaces. Such interfaces represent an emerging interdisciplinary research direction, involving spoken language understanding, natural language understanding, image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, experimental psychology, etc. They aim at efficient, convenient and natural interaction and communication between computers and human users, and represent a radical departure from previous computing that should ultimately enable users to interact with computers using everyday skills. The main goals of ICMI 2008 are to further scientific research within the broad field of multimodal interaction and systems, to focus on major trends and challenges, and to help identify a roadmap for future research and commercial success. Topics of interest this year include multimodal and multimedia processing, multimodal input and output interfaces, multimodal applications, user modeling and adaptation, multimodal architectures, tools and standards, and evaluation of multimodal interfaces. The 3-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 Spotlight 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. More information about the ICMI 2008 conference is available at www.icmi2008.org/.
Broader Impacts: The Doctoral Spotlight 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.
