ICMI-MLMI

Welcome to the 20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2018) held in Boulder CO, October 16 to 20, 2018. Boulder lies at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and is home to the University of Colorado Boulder, one of the leading public research institutions in the United States, as well as to numerous government research institutes (e.g., NIST, NOAA, NCAR) and tech hubs (e.g., Google, Oracle).

ICMI 2018 will continue and enhance the legacy of the ICMI conference series, which serves as the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multisensor, multimodal humanhuman and human-computer interaction and interfaces. ICMI 2018 is a single-track conference featuring three keynotes, 63 technical full and short papers (including 28 oral and 35 poster presentations), two panel sessions, two tutorials, 18 papers presented in two grand challenges, 6 demonstrations/exhibits, a Doctoral Consortium with 12 papers, late-breaking results papers, and 5 workshops with more than 40 papers, keynotes, and extended discussions. Indeed, there will be considerable cutting-edge and exciting multimodal interaction research presented and discussed at the conference.

We maintained ICMI's rigorous peer-review process for the main conference track. We received 149 full and short paper submissions, which is on par with the 151 submissions received for ICMI 2017 and greater than all previous ICMI conferences. We accepted 46 long papers (23 for oral presentation and 23 for poster presentation) and 17 short papers (5 oral and 12 posters), resulting in an overall acceptance rate of 42.3%, an oral (short and long) acceptance rate of 18.8% and an oral long paper acceptance rate of 15.4%. These 63 papers will be presented over six oral sessions and two poster sessions during the three main conference days (October 17-19, 2018).

ICMI 2018 includes several new initiatives to keep the conference series fresh and exciting. These begin with the conference theme of "Multi-modal Understanding of Multi-Party Interactions," which emphasize the importance of multimodality in group interactions involving human-human and human-machine teams. There are multiple sessions devoted to the conference theme, including a special panel session and a workshop. Second, realizing the importance of basic research in the behavioral and social sciences, we revised the review criteria to include novelty with respect to scientific knowledge in addition to the more traditional technical/algorithmic novelty. Third, we introduced a new Late Breaking Results category so that researchers can share their most recent results at the conference.

Multimodal researchers are notably social, so the ICMI 2018 social program includes long lunch breaks at the conference venue to promote interactions among delegates, a welcome reception, a banquet at the University of Colorado Boulder's Folsom Field (which features spectacular views of the mountains), and a hiking trip to Mount Sanitas - Boulder's home mountain. In addition to these events, the conference is located at the historic Hotel Boulderado, which is in the heart of downtown's Pearl Street pedestrian mall with restaurants, sidewalk cafés, breweries, boutiques, and bookstores. And of course, there are hundreds of miles of hiking and biking trails and some of the best rock climbing spots just miles away.