workshop announcement

[Samy Bengio]

Dear all,

I would like to announce the following Workshop:

               JOINT AMI/PASCAL/IM2/M4 Workshop on
   Multimodal Interaction and Related Machine Learning Algorithms
            http://www.idiap.ch/events/workshop-mlmi04/

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Where: Centre du Parc (http://www.hotelduparc.ch/), Martigny, Switzerland
When: 21-23 June 2004
Deadline for paper submission: 22 April 2004

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In the framework of this workshop, participants are invited to submit full
papers for oral or poster presentation in the following areas of interest:

+ human-human communication modeling
+ speech and visual processing
+ multi-modal processing, fusion and fission
+ multi-modal dialog modeling
+ human-human interaction modeling
+ multi-modal data structuring and presentation
+ multimedia indexing and retrieval
+ meeting structure analysis
+ meeting summarizing
+ multimodal meeting annotation
+ machine learning applied to the above

                          =========================

The workshop is organized jointly by 4 European and Swiss National projects:

AMI (Augmented Multiparty Interaction, http://www.amiproject.org) is a
newly launched (January 2004) European Integrated Project (IP) funded
under Framework FP6 as part of its IST program.
AMI targets computer enhanced multi-modal interaction in the context of
meetings. The project aims at substantially advancing the state-of-the-art,
within important underpinning technologies (such as human-human communication
modeling, speech recognition, computer vision, multimedia indexing and
retrieval). It will also produce tools for off-line and on-line browsing of
multi-modal meeting data, including meeting structure analysis and summarizing
functions. The project also makes recorded and annotated multimodal meeting
data widely available for the European research community, thereby
contributing to the research infrastructure in the field.

PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational Learning,
http:///www.pascal-network.org) is a newly lauched (December 2003)
European Network of Excellence (NoE)
as part of its IST program. The NoE brings together experts from basic
research areas such as Statistics, Optimisation and Computational Learning
and from a number of application areas, with the objective of integrating
research agendas and improving the state of the art in all concerned fields.

IM2 (Interactive Multimodal Information Management, http://www.im2.ch) is
a Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) aiming at
the advancement of research, and the development of prototypes, in the
field of man-machine interaction. IM2 is particularly concerned with
technologies coordinating natural input modes (such as speech, image, pen,
touch, hand gestures, head and/or body movements, and even physiological
sensors) with multimedia system outputs, such as speech, sounds, images, 3D
graphics and animation. Among other application, IM2 is also targeting
research and development in the context of smart meeting rooms.

M4 (Multi-Modal Meeting Manager, http://www.m4project.org)
is a EU IST project launched in March 2002
concerned with the construction of a demonstration system to enable
structuring, browsing and querying of an archive of automatically analysed
meetings. The archived meetings will have taken place in a room equipped
with multimodal sensors.

                          =========================
General Chairs :

Samy Bengio, IDIAP
Herve Bourlard, IDIAP

Programme Committee :

Jean Carletta, University of Edinburg
Phil Green, Univ. Sheffield
Jan Larson, Technical University of Denmark
Nelson Morgan, ICSI/Berkeley
Erkki Oja, Helsinky University of Technology
Barbara Peskin, ICSI Berkeley
Thierry Pun, University of Geneva
Steve Renals, University of Edinburg
John Shawe-Taylor, University of Southampton
Steve Whittaker, University of Sheffield

                          =========================

Current list of invited speakers:

Bill Buxton, Buxton Design
Yorick Wilks, Sheffield University
Jonathan Foote, FX Palo Alto Laboratory
Prof Stephen Cox, University of East Anglia
Prof Roddy Cowie, Queen's University, Belfast
Jordy Cohen, VoiceSignal
David Nahamoo, IBM Research


----
Samy Bengio
Senior Researcher in Machine Learning.
IDIAP, CP 592, rue du Simplon 4, 1920 Martigny, Switzerland.
tel: +41 27 721 77 39, fax: +41 27 721 77 12.
mailto:bengio at idiap.ch, http://www.idiap.ch/~bengio