Proceedings of the 2009 international conference on Multimodal interfaces

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to Cambridge and the joint meeting of the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces and the workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction! This year ICMI and MLMI decided to join forces. The advisory boards of both meetings supported this decision as a way to consolidate the community and expand the range of topics of both meetings. We hope the decision will further improve the quality of this joint meeting and also unify the locus for the novel ideas in the area of Multimodal Interfaces and Interactions. As a result of this effort, this year has seen an increase in submissions. We have nearly 120 papers, 20 demos and 5 workshop and 4 Special session proposals submitted to the conference committee. Out of the 118 papers submitted, 41 were selected for oral and poster presentation, bringing the conference acceptance rate to 35%. Half of the demonstration proposals were accepted, bringing the number of academic demonstrations to ten. We are hosting four post-conference workshops centered on novel topics of multi-modality. Finally, one of the four proposed special sessions was selected for inclusion into the program, where it appears as a collection of six additional invited papers. The review process was organized using the PCS submission and review system, which ICMI has used in the past. We are grateful to James Stewart for his timely and professional support. To streamline the review process, this year we have selected a smaller number of Area Chairs (ACs) who appointed the Program Committee. The papers were allocated to ACs in areas of their expertise according to the indications of the submitters, and then checked for conflicts. ACs distributed the papers to members of program committee and volunteer reviewers for comments. Once reviews were submitted the ACs provided meta-reviews for all papers. The scores of the papers were then collected and tabulated. All reviews and papers were then again checked by the Program Chairs, and papers with highly varying scores received an additional round of reviews. Based on this thorough review process 41 papers were selected for presentation. The program was formed by grouping papers into main topics of interest for this year's conference. Following the trend in the academic meetings to reduce amount of waste we decided to distribute the conference proceedings on USB Flash Drives. We decided that flash drives provide the best tradeoff between cost and flexibility for participants since they can be freely re-used once their content is thoroughly memorized. This year we have selected 6 papers as candidates for two awards: Outstanding Student Paper, sponsored by MERL, and Outstanding Paper, sponsored by Google. An anonymous committee has been selected by Program and General Chairs reviewing 10% of the top scoring papers. You will find the nominated papers in the conference program marked with special symbol. The final award decisions will be made at the conference banquet on Monday evening. The financial crisis has taken its toll on everyone. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has very generously provided us with travel and housing support for twelve students to help offset pressure on academic travel budgets. Two European academic projects have also contributed significant amount of funds to the conference organization: Augmented Multi-Party Interaction (AMI), and the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research on Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2). Finally, we thank the European Network of Excellence on Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modeling, and Computational Learning (PASCAL 2) for the funding to support the travel of two of our keynote speakers. Even in these difficult times, many companies affirmed their support of the multimodal interaction and interface research community by providing ICMI-MLMI with a previously unseen level of financial support. All of these organizations deserve our warmest gratitude: Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Google, Microsoft Research, Honda Research Institute-US, The Mathworks, and Telefonica! Without their generous support this meeting would not have been possible.