ICMI-MLMI

Welcome to Istanbul and to the 16th edition of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2014. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal humanhuman 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.

As in the previous years, in 2014, we had a strong number of submissions: 127 long and short paper submissions (82 long papers and 45 short papers) and 16 demonstration papers. From these submissions, we accepted 23 papers for oral presentation and 28 papers for poster presentation. We have an acceptance rate of 18% for oral presentations and an overall acceptance rate of 40% for short and long papers combined. Of the 16 demonstration papers, 10 were accepted.

This year, the conference will host four invited keynote talks from thought leaders in academia and industry. They are Yvonne Rogers (University College London, UK), Cafer Tosun (SAP Innovation Center, Turkey), Peter Robinson (Cambridge University, UK), and Alexander Waibel (Carnegie Mellon University, USA and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany). In addition to these keynotes, we will host a plenary talk by the recipient of the Sustained Accomplishment Award, presented for the first time by the ICMI Advisory Board.

A number of satellite events will be held along with the main conference. The ICMI program includes three multimodal grand challenges and a doctoral consortium. The challenges are designed to stimulate the community with standardized corpora competition, and new research questions. The doctoral consortium extends our commitment to the emerging generation of researchers. ICMI will be followed by five workshops, which are selected from the nine workshop proposals we received.

The Doctoral Consortium, co-chaired by Marco Cristani and Justine Cassell, is organized on the first day of the conference. In this special session, a highly-accomplished mentor team and selected senior PhD students gather around a round table to discuss research plans and progress of each student. This combination of peer and expert evaluation aims to promote the next generation of multimodal interaction researchers, and to strengthen the ICMI community. Accepted students receive a travel grant and registration waiver to attend both the Doctoral Consortium event, and the main conference. From among 19 applications, 14 students were accepted for participation and to receive travel funding. The organizers thank the U.S. National Science Foundation (award IIS 1443097) and conference sponsors for the financial support to make this happen.

The Multimodal Grand Challenges were introduced to ICMI in 2012. This year's challenges are co-chaired by Hatice Gunes and Dirk Heylen and include the Third Multimodal Learning Analytics Challenge, the Second Emotion Recognition In The Wild Challenge and the Mapping Personality Traits Challenge (MAPTRAITS). All three Grand Challenges will be presented on Wednesday, November 12nd, and a summary session will take place on Friday, November 14th, during the main conference.

The workshops in this year's program take place on the final day of the conference, and include the Workshop on Multimodal, Multi-Party, Real-World Human-Robot Interaction, the Workshop on Understanding and Modeling Multiparty, Multimodal Interactions, the Workshop on Roadmapping the Future of Multimodal Interaction Research including Business Opportunities and Challenges, 2nd International Workshop on Emotion Representations and Modelling in Human-Computer Interaction Systems, and 7th Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction: Eye-Gaze and Multimodality. Carlos Busso and Alexandros Potamianos are co-chairing this year's workshops.

The main conference program includes a Demonstrations & Exhibits session, co-chaired by Lale Akarun and Kazuhiro Otsuka, which is intended to showcase innovative implementations, systems, and technologies demonstrating new ideas about interactive multimodal interfaces.

The general themes that dominated this year's accepted papers focused on social interaction, multimodal fusion and integration, affect and cognitive modeling, discourse and dialogue modeling, and analysis of nonverbal behaviors such as gestures, body pose and gaze. Other prominent themes include mobile interaction, human-robot interaction, healthcare and assistive technologies, ubiquitous and pervasive environments. Finally, we have several papers on the theme of "urban interactions," which we have added to the main themes of ICMI as a new area with growing interest.

The review process for the short and long papers was organized using the PCS submission and review system, as in the previous years. The quality of the review process was high, thanks to 23 Senior Program Committee (SPC) members who helped the Program Chairs in defining the Technical Program Committee, and in finding excellent reviewers for each paper. Overseen by the Program Chairs, each SPC member has been assigned a maximum of six papers, based on their preferences in a bidding process and their expertise. The SPC members distributed the papers to members of the Technical Program Committee and volunteer reviewers. Once reviews were submitted, the SPCs provided meta-reviews, which, along with the reviews, were sent to the authors for a rebuttal -- a step which allows authors to clarify their intentions and results in higher quality final reviews. In a final step, all papers and their reviews were discussed in detail by the Program Chairs on a two-day remote meeting, in order to decide on the list of accepted submissions. We are indebted to the contributions of our reviewers and program and area chairs. The program was formed by grouping papers into main topics of interest for this year's conference. Following the trend in previous ICMI events and many other academic meetings, to minimize paper consumption, we decided to distribute the conference proceedings electronically, and did not print paper proceedings.

ICMI traditionally gives outstanding paper awards. The Program Chairs pre-selected the top-ranked paper submissions based on the reviews and meta-reviews and identified the nominees for both the Outstanding Paper Award and Outstanding Student Paper Award. An Outstanding Paper Award committee was created with internationally renowned researchers in multimodal interaction. The committee reviewed these topranked papers carefully and selected the recipients of the Outstanding Student Paper Award and the Outstanding Paper Award.

Beginning this year, the ICMI Advisory Board established three new awards. The Sustained Accomplishment Award is presented to a scientist who has made innovative and long-lasting contributions to our field. The Award acknowledges an individual who has demonstrated vision in shaping the field, with a sustained record of research that has influenced the work of others. The Ten-Year Technical Impact Award is presented to a group of scientists for contributing a seminal paper published in ICMI (or conferences and workshops that evolved into ICMI). For its first edition, this award is given to a paper published 10 years or more in the past. Finally, the Community Service Award is presented to an individual for making sustained organizational contributions with positive impact on the ICMI community. The awardees for all categories are announced at the conference banquet.

As in previous editions, ICMI 2014 has been organized with the support of ACM and SIGCHI. In addition, considerable support has been provided by our generous sponsors. We have two diamond sponsors (SAP Innovation Center Turkey and NSF), and one gold sponsor (Openstream). We have received additional infrastructure and logistics support from Boğaziçi University, where the conference takes place. Turkish Airlines was our official airline. For Dr. Robinson's keynote, we thank the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program. We are grateful for the support extended by all these organizations.