Mimic'09: Management and interaction with multimodal information content

Abstract

Communication is the core for cultural, scientific, economic and technological evolution of the contemporary society, its progress and innovation. Nowadays, more and more Information and Communication Technologies are emphasizing the central role of all issues connected with communication. The numerous and different ways people are using to communicate with each other, the multiplicity of features to produce and exchange information, and the relevance and pervasiveness of multimodal, mobile devices and phenomena such as Internet, are all elements that enhance the complexity of communication processes and their management. Devices supporting multimodal interaction become more and more widespread. When applied in an appropriate way, multimodal interaction provides users with a flexible, natural and robust interaction approach, allowing them to communicate in a synergistic manner using their five senses along with several communication channels. This also permits the organization to store, index, retrieve and more generally to manage a wide amount of multimodal data and information, thus, enabling people to use a multimodal dialog approach in order to access information and/or services. In this context, we have decided to contribute to the scientific debate concerning these emerging questions defining this special issue. After a very selective peer review, nine papers were selected for publication. They deal with theories and techniques concerning multimodal information retrieval, indexing, query processing and extracting features from multimodal data, multimodal interaction issues, and applications.