ICMI-MLMI

We have great pleasure in welcoming you to the 15th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction -- ICMI 2013. 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.

Similarly to recent years, 2013 saw a very strong number of submissions: a record 133 long and short paper submissions, 11 demonstration papers, 5 multimodal grand challenge proposals and 3 workshop proposals. From the 133 long and short paper submissions, 49 were accepted for oral (27) or poster (22) presentation after a rigorous peer review process, bringing the acceptance rate to 37% overall and 20% for oral presentation. In addition, the program includes three invited keynote talks from Professors James Rehg, Stefan Kopp and Mark Billinghurst.

The general themes that dominated this year's accepted papers focused on communication, interaction, virtual and robotic agents, and social-personality topics. Other heavily represented topics also focused on different communication modalities and related processing strategies, including spoken interaction, audio-visual, gesture and body movement, gaze, and pen or handwriting. In addition, other common themes included user-centered design & modeling, mobile interfaces, spatiotemporal processing, machine learning, adaptive processing, emotion, cognition, and language. Finally, diversity in this year's themes included a smaller number of papers on the nonetheless important topics of error handling, retrieval, tangible interfaces, brain-computer interfaces, and visualization tools.

The review process was organized using the PCS submission and review system, and the review process included a rebuttal step. The process was assisted by 24 Associate Chairs (ACs), who helped the Program Chairs in defining the Program Committee. The papers were allocated to ACs in areas via a bidding process overseen by the Program Chairs, and then checked for conflicts. The Associate Chairs distributed the papers to members of the program committee and volunteer reviewers for comments. Once reviews were submitted, the ACs provided meta-reviews for all papers which were sent to the authors for rebuttal consideration. After hearing the authors' arguments, the scores of the papers were then collected and tabulated. All papers and their reviews were finally discussed at length by the Program Chairs in order to decide on the list of accepted submissions.

The program was formed by grouping papers into main topics of interest for this year's conference. Following the trend of ICMI and many other academic meetings, to minimize paper consumption, the conference proceedings are distributed on USB flash drives only. A committee of senior ICMI leaders has been formed to select among the very best papers for Outstanding Paper Awards. These awards include best papers that were first authored by a student, and also papers by ICMI professionals. The final award decisions will be announced at the conference banquet.

As in previous events, ICMI has been organized with the support of ACM and SIGCHI. In addition, despite the difficult financial period, many sponsors have lent their support to the event. Significant funding has been provided by Openstream and by National ICT Australia, which each deserve particular mention for their dedication to ICMI 2013. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) and Tateishi Foundation have generously provided us with travel, accommodation and living expense support for several students to allow them to travel the great distance to Australia to participate in ICMI and particularly to present at the Doctoral Consortium. Similar support for Australasian participants has been provided by the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association. Significant support was also provided by the US Office of Naval Research and Microsoft Research. These organizations collectively deserve our warmest gratitude; without their generous support, this conference would not have been possible.