This is funding to support attendance by approximately 12 graduate students in a Doctoral Spotlight (workshop) to be held in conjunction with the 2009 International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces/Machine Learning for Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI-MLMI 2009), which will take place November 2-6 in Cambridge, Mass., and is organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) with co-sponsorship from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). This year the Eleventh International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2009) will merge with the Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interfaces; the combined ICMI-MLMI will be the premier event representing the growing interest in next-generation perceptive, adaptive and multimodal user interfaces. Such interfaces represent an emerging interdisciplinary research direction, involving spoken and natural language understanding, image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, experimental psychology, etc. They aim to promote efficient 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-MLMI 2009 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; human interaction analysis and modeling; and multimodal data, evaluation, and standards. The 3-day main event on the MIT campus, to be followed by 5 affiliated workshops, 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, and single-track oral and poster presentations will facilitate interaction and discussion among researchers; the conference promises to be an international venue for brainstorming and coming up with creative directions for future research in multimodal interfaces. 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 senior personnel, and including the Advisory Committee chair and the General and Program chairs. As a further incentive for high-quality student participation, ICMI-MLMI will be awarding outstanding paper awards, with a special category just for student papers. More information about ICMI-MLMI is available online at http://icmi2009.acm.org.
Broader Impacts: The Doctoral Spotlight will give student participants 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. Student participants will be selected by the PI with oversight from the Advisory Committee chair and the Conference General chair, with the goal of increasing breadth of participation; to this end, priority will be given to students whose advisors or departments have insufficient funds to otherwise support their participation. Students funded under this award will predominantly be U.S. residents enrolled at U.S. institutions of higher education.
