eNTERFACE Workshops on Multimodal Interfaces: A success story
Albert Salah and Thierry Dutoit
SLTC Newsletter, February 2010
The eNTERFACE workshops were born in Mons Belgium, in 2005, as the largest and most original dissemination action of the SIMILAR European Network of Excellence on multimodal interfaces. Their aim is to gather a team of leading professionals in multimodal man-machine interfaces together with students in one place, to work on a pre-specified list of challenges, for 4 complete weeks. In this respect, it is an innovative and intensive collaboration scheme, designed to allow researchers to integrate their software tools, deploy demonstrators, collect novel databases, and work side by side with a great number of experts. After the completion of the SIMILAR project, the OpenInterface Foundation was established to continue these fruitful series of workshops.
The workshop is held on a yearly basis, in July-August, and organized around ten research projects dealing with multimodal human-machine interfaces design. As such, they are radically different from traditional scientific workshops, in which only specialists meet for a few days to discuss state-of-the art problems, but do not really work together.
The senior participants of the workshop are mainly university professors, industrial and governmental researchers presently working in widely dispersed locations. Junior researchers are mostly PhD students. The organization of these workshops was inspired by the successful DARPA workshops on speech recognition organized yearly by Prof. Jelinek at Johns Hopkins University. A call for projects is first issued, aimed for senior researchers, who then respond by proposing projects. This is an international call, and it is widely circulated in all related major scientific networks. The eNTERFACE scientific committee evaluates the proposals, and selects about ten projects. In the second phase, a call for participation is circulated, where the project leaders get to build their team months before the workshop. The would-be participants send in a CV and why they are interested in joining a project. Graduate students familiar with the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance. Depending on outstanding academic promise, a small number of under-graduates or even high-school students have been selected in the past for participating in the workshop.
The funding scheme of the workshop is unusual. There are no registration fees, but participants need to provide for their travel, lodging, and catering expenses, using their own project finances or other EU, national, or regional funding. The University organizing the workshop exploits catering and lodging possibilities at minimal student rates whenever possible. Grants and sponsorships are sought from scientific societies (including OpenInterface Foundation and EURASIP), governmental bodies (including national scientific organizations like SenterNovem), municipalities, international networks (like SSPNet) and from the industry.
The workshop aims for scientific collaboration by bringing together many researchers in human-computer interaction to work on specific projects. During the workshop it becomes possible to tap into the expertise of these researchers. Participants who developed novel tools (e.g. middleware, toolboxes, platforms, hardware) organize tutorial sessions to disseminate their tools, and researchers who attend these sessions learn new tools in the fastest possible way. The projects themselves are ideal platforms to bring together modules developed by different groups. Some projects foster collaboration between computer scientists that develop the tools, and other parties who ask the relevant questions (e.g. artists, psychologists, industrial partners).
The projects of the workshop deal with many different aspects of multimodal interfaces. A few past projects should illustrate the span of the workshop:
- Gathering a novel database in a field that lacks one (e.g. a 3D facial expression database),
- Exploring a new modality in an innovative scenario (e.g. a multi-player game using neurophysiological sensors),
- Enabling artists make use of novel interfaces (e.g. a multimodal guitar),
- Building a demonstrator for a newly starting international project (e.g. an activity-related biometrics demonstrator)
- Integrating a novel modality in an existing application framework (e.g. a sign-language enabled information kiosk)
The workshop is also an ideal platform for networking, which is important for young PhD students. A lab visit to another university exposes the student to a new group, but eNTERFACE exposes the student to a host of groups (in addition to several important plenary speakers), and there are plenty of opportunities for senior researchers to assess a student in one month. Many PhD students find postdoc connections during the workshop. The senior researchers leading the groups also find connections for new projects, as well as industrial partners.
The workshop uses many channels of dissemination. The mid-term and final project presentations are open to public. Each group prepares detailed project reports, which are collected in an edited volume, and sent to the participants. The reports, collected databases, and jointly developed (OpenSource) software are made available at the workshop website. All such material from the previous workshops is open to public, and can be accessed. Groups often continue their collaboration after the workshop, and project reports are extended into peer-reviewed joint publications. Springer Verlag's Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces has in the past run a special issue dedicated for extended papers from the eNTERFACE workshop. Other publications have appeared in many leading journals. Each workshop so far also enjoyed press coverage in national media.
Clearly, the eNTERFACE workshops provide a unique opportunity for younger researchers to develop their skills and enlarge their professional network by being fully involved in a collaborative project. They also make it possible for senior researchers to start multi-laboratory short-term projects, which can then give birth to larger project proposals. Thanks to active social programs, all participants also clearly benefit from literally living together for four weeks with a clear and ambitious scientific goal.
The first eNTERFACE was organized by Faculté Polytechnique de Mons in 2005. Since then, the workshop is being hosted by a different group each year; University of Zagreb in 2006, Bogaziçi University in 2007, CNRS-LIMSI in 2008, and University of Genova in 2009. It created an international community around itself, and has its regular attendees, who join the workshop every year with new projects. The eNTERFACE'10 workshop is being organized by Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam (ISLA-ISIS), of University of Amsterdam. The call for participation will be open until 15th February 2010.
Albert Salah is with the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Email: a.a.salah@uva.nl. Thierry Dutoit is with the University of Mons. Email: mailto:Thierry.Dutoit@umons.ac.be.
Add A Comment