SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON MULTIMEDIA LANGUAGE PROCESSING (SIGMEDIA) July 1st 2006 CHAIR: Elisabeth André ( University of Augsburg , Germany , andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de) MAILING ADDRESS: andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de URL: http://www.sigmedia.org CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS: The main activity was the organization of a Tutorial and Research Workshop on PERCEPTION AND INTERACTIVE TECHNOLOGIES which was held in Kloster Irsee from June 19 to June 20, 2006 . The organizing committee consisted of: Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg , Germany , Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark , Wolfgang Minker, Heiko Neumann and Michael Weber, all three from University of Ulm , Germany. Given the state of ongoing research in perceptive interfaces, we found it timely to organize a Tutorial and Research Workshop to discuss how to enhance natural language dialogue systems with perceptive capabilities. The URL of the workshop is: http://it.e-technik.uni-ulm.de/World/Research.DS/irsee-workshops/pit06/introduction.html The workshop proceedings have been published by Springer: http://www.springer.com/dal/home/generic/search/results?SGWID=1-40109-22-173660906-0 The workshop was a continuation of a successful series of workshops that started with an ISCA Tutorial and ResearchWorkshop on Multimodal Dialogue Systems in 1999. This workshop was followed by a second one focusing on mobile dialogue systems (IDS 2002) and a third one exploring the role of affect in dialogue (ADS 2004). As the previous workshops, the PIT workshop was organized in collaboration with SIGDial. SIGMEDIA plans to participate in the organization of a follow-up workshop in about 2 years focusing on a specific aspect related to natural language dialogue systems. The exact theme will be determined by the beginning of next year.