Multimodal Web Workshop and Seminars

W3C organized a workshop on Multimodal Interaction, under the auspices of the IST Programme's MWeb project on 19-20 July, .

As the W3C Multimodal Interaction Activity is entering its third year, much progress has been made defining the W3C MMI framework, and the workshop was organised as an opportunity for discussing W3C's current plans and for providing feedback and suggestions for future work. Another goal of the workshop was looking for feedback from multimodal user communities that are currently less well represented in the W3C Multimodal work (eg automotive industry/telematics, home entertainment industry, healthcare, aerospace and manufacturing) as well as feedback and input from the Multimodal research community.

41 people attended the workshop and 19 papers (publicly available) were presented, both from academia and the industry, contributing for a better understanding of each other's experience and requirements. The workshop concluded with separate "break-out" sessions, where participants gathered to discuss problems of more specific interest to them, such as multimodal interaction on mobile devices or advanced academic research. Many attendants also expressed a need for a multimodal interaction authoring language.

The organizers are confident that the results of these discussions as well as the quality of the papers and presentations made this workshop very successful. All papers and slides are available online, but the organizers are still working on editing the minutes of the discussions, for publication in the next few weeks.

Seminars in Madrid and Berlin
Two Multimodal Web seminars will inform European research and industry about the results of W3C’s Multimodal current work. These seminars are organized in Berlin 13 October 2004 and Madrid 18 November 2004. They will use a combination of speakers from W3C Members and W3C team. Attendance is open to the public.

Links:
MMI Workshop page: http://www.w3.org/2004/02/mmi-workshop-cfp.html
MMI Workshop papers: http://www.w3.org/2004/02/mmi-workshop/papers
Multimodal Web Seminar in Berlin: http://www.w3c.de/Events/2004/membermeeting.html
Multimodal Interaction Seminar in Madrid, 18 November 2004 http://www.w3c.es/Eventos/2004/Noviembre/MMI/