ANNUAL REPORT

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON MULTIMEDIA LANGUAGE PROCESSING

(SIGMEDIA)

June 12th 2004

CHAIR: Elisabeth Andre (University of Augsburg, Germany,
andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de)

MAILING ADDRESS: sigmedia@dfki.de

URL: http://www.sigmedia.org

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS:

In the last reporting period, SIGMedia has been serving as a sponsor
for three events at the crossroads of virtual agents, affective
interfaces and speech-based dialogue systems.

Following the tradition of the successful ISCA Tutorial and Research
Workshop on Multi-Modal Dialogue in Mobile Environments (IDS02) in
2002, SIGMEDIA organized another Tutorial and Research workshop on
Affective Dialogue Systems (ADS04) in collaboration with the ACL
Special Interest Group SIGDial. The workshop will take place at
Kloster Irsee, Germany from June 14-16, 2004. The organizing committee
consists of: Elisabeth Andr, University of Augsburg, Germany,
Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark, Paul Heisterkamp,
DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany, and Wolfgang Minker, University of Ulm,
Germany. The URL of the workshop is: http://www.sigmedia.org/ads04/
The proceedings have already been published in the Springer LNCS
series, see http://www.springeronline.com/3-540-22143-3

Two events sponsored by SIGMEDIA were successfully completed during
the last reporting phase:

    4th International Working Conference on Intelligent Virtual
Agents, Kloster Irsee, Germany, Sept. 15th-17th, 2003. The URL of the
working conference is: http://www.sigmedia.org/iva03.

    Dagstuhl Seminar on Evaluating Embodied Conversational Agents,
Dagstuhl Germany, March 15th-19th, 2004. The URL of the Seminar is:
http://www.dagstuhl.de/04121/


COOPERATIONS WITH OTHER NETWORKS AND INSTITUTIONS:

SIGMEDIA members have been involved in the preparation of a proposal
for a European network called Human-Machine Interaction Network on
Emotions (HUMAINE). The proposal has been accepted by the EC and the
Network started work in January 2004. SIGMEDIA plans to organize
workshops and summer schools in cooperation with this network.