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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">ICMI 2021: Call for Multimodal Grand Challenges</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">http://icmi.acm.org/2021/index.php?id=challenges</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">18-22 Oct 2021, Montreal, Canada</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">We are calling for teams to propose one or more ICMI Multimodal Grand Challenges.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">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. 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, computational (para-) linguistics and physiological signal processing, for example, the availability of datasets and common tasks have led to great progress. We invite the ICMI community to collectively define and tackle the scientific Grand Challenges in our domain for the next 5 years. ICMI Multimodal Grand Challenges aim to inspire new ideas in the ICMI community and create momentum for future collaborative work. Analysis, synthesis, and interactive tasks are all possible.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">Challenge papers will be indexed in the main proceedings of ICMI.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">We invite organizers from various fields related to multimodal interaction to propose and run Grand Challenge events. We are looking for exciting and stimulating challenges including but not limited to the following categories:</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">- 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 and compared in rigorous conditions. Participants in the Challenge will evaluate their methods against the challenge data in order to identify areas of strengths and weaknesses.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">- Use-case challenge: This challenge will provide an interactive problem system (e.g. dialog-based or non-verbal-based) and the associated resources, which can allow people to participate through the integration of specific modules or alternative full systems. Proposers should also establish systematic evaluation procedures.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">- Health challenge: This challenge will provide a dataset that is exemplary of a health related task, whose analysis, diagnosis, treatment or prevention can be aided by Multimodal Interactions. The challenge should focus on exploring the benefits of multimodal (audio, visual, physiological, etc) solutions for the stated task.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">- Policy challenge: Legal, ethical, and privacy issues of Multimodal Interaction systems in the age of AI. The challenge could revolve around opinion papers, panels, discussions, etc.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">Prospective organizers should submit a five-page maximum proposal containing the following information:</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">1.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Title</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">2.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Abstract appropriate for possible Web promotion of the Challenge</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">3.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Distinctive topics to be addressed and specific goals</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">4.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Detailed description of the Challenge and its relevance to multimodal interaction</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">5.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Length (full day or half day)</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">6.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Plan for soliciting participation</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">7.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Description of how submissions (challenge’s submissions and papers) will be evaluated, and a list of proposed reviewers</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">8.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Proposed schedule for releasing datasets (if applicable) and/or systems (if applicable) and receiving submissions</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">9.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Short biography of the organizers (preferably from multiple institutions)</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">10.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Funding source (if any) that supports or could support the challenge organization</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">11.<span style="white-space:pre;"> </span>Draft call for papers; affiliations and email address of the organisers; summary of the Grand Challenge; list of potential Technical Program Committee members and their affiliations, important dates</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">Proposals will be evaluated based on originality, ambition, feasibility, and implementation plan. A Challenge with dataset(s) or system(s) that has had pilot results to ensure its representativity and suitability to the proposed task will be given preference for acceptance; an additional 1 page description must be attached in such case. Continuation of or variants on the 2019 challenges are welcome, though we ask for submissions of this form to highlight the number of participants that attended during the previous year and describe what changes (if any) will be made from the previous year.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">The ICMI organizers will offer support with basic logistics, which includes rooms and equipment to run the Workshop, coffee breaks can be offered if synchronised with the main conference.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">Important Dates and Contact Details</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">Proposals due: January 27, 2021</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">Proposal notification: February 3, 2021</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">Paper camera-ready: August 17, 2021</span><br>
<span style="font-family:SimSun;">Grand challenge date: October 18 or 22, 2021</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:SimSun;">Proposals should be emailed to both ICMI 2021 Multimodal Grand Challenge Chairs, Jean-Marc Odobez and Dirk Heylen via icmi2021-challenge-chairs@acm.org. Prospective organizers are also encouraged to contact the co-chairs if they have any questions. Proposals are due by January 27, 2021. Notifications will be sent on February 3, 2021.</span><br>
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<span style="font-family:'Times New Roman';">Dongmei Jiang</span>
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<span style="font-family:'Times New Roman';">Professor, Head of Dept. Computer Information Engineering,</span>
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<span style="font-family:'Times New Roman';">School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University</span>
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<span style="font-family:'Times New Roman';">Xi'an China.</span>
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<span style="font-family:'Times New Roman';">Tel: +86-29-88431532</span>
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<span style="font-family:'Times New Roman';">Email: jiangdm@nwpu.edu.cn</span>
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