ICMI 2012 Call for Multimodal Grand Challenges
International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) 2012
Santa Monica, CA, Oct. 22-26, 2012
First Call for Multimodal Grand Challenges
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The International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) is the
premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal
human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The
conference focuses on theoretical and empirical foundations, component
technologies, and combined multimodal processing techniques that define the
field of multimodal interaction analysis, interface design, and system
development.
Multimodal technologies are fundamentally changing the ways people interact
with each other and with computers. Multimodal systems – recognizing
language and gesture exchanged among people or as input to interfaces in physical
environments or mobile devices – facilitate and enrich social
interactions and allow people to naturally interact with computer systems with minimal
training, for domains such as communications, education, entertainment, and robotics.
Developing systems that can robustly understand human-human
communication or respond to human input requires identifying the best algorithms and their
failure modes. In fields such as computer vision, speech recognition, and
computational linguistics, the availability of datasets and common tasks have
led to great progress. We invite the research community to collectively define
and tackle the scientific Grand Challenges in our domain for the next 5 years.
Multimodal Grand Challenges are driven by ideas that are bold,innovative, and
inclusive. They should inspire new ideas in the multimodal interaction
community and create momentum for future collaborative work. Analysis,
synthesis, and interactive tasks are all possible.
We are seeking organizers to propose and run Grand Challenge events. Both
academic and corporate organizers are welcome. We are looking for three
types of challenges:
1. Dataset-driven challenge. This challenge will provide a dataset that is
exemplary of the complexities of current and future multimodal problems,
and one or more multimodal tasks whose performance can be objectively measured.
Participants in the Challenge will evaluate their methods against the
challenge data in order to identify areas of strength and weakness.
2. User case challenge. This challenge will provide an interactive
problem or system (e.g. dialog-based) and the associated resources,
which allow people to participate through the integration of specific
modules or alternative full systems. Proposers should also establish
systematic evaluation procedures.
3. Concept challenge. This challenge proposes new ideas (e.g. involving new
sensors) that, while not fully tested now, could lead to breakthroughs
if the community decided to tackle them together or individually.
Prospective organizers should submit a five-page max proposal containing
the following information:
– Title
– Abstract appropriate for possible Web promotion of the Challenge
– Detailed description of the challenge and its relevance to multimodal
interaction.
– Plan for soliciting participation
– Proposed schedule for releasing datasets and receiving submissions.
– Short bio of the organizers
– Funding source (if any) that supports or could support the challenge
organization.
– Preference (if any) for special session or workshop format.
Proposals will be evaluated based on originality, ambition, feasibility,
and implementation plan. The ICMI organizers offer support with basic
logistics and with the identification of additional funding sources (e.g. for awards).
Proposals should be emailed to the ICMI 2012 Challenge Co-Chairs.
Prospective organizers are also encouraged to contact them in case of questions.
Important dates
Proposal submissions: December 9, 2011
Notifications: December 16, 2011
ICMI 2012: October 22-26, 2012
ICMI 2012 Grand Challenge Chairs
Daniel Gatica-Perez
Idiap Research Institute
gatica(at)idiap.ch
Stefanie Tellex
MIT
stefie10(at)csail.mit.edu
