Abstract In this article we introduce special issue of Multimodal Communication. We briefly describe the founding Research Centre and journal Communication before introducing each articles featured in issue.

1 Abstract This paper presents work on multimodal communication with an anthropomorphic agent. It focuses on processing of multimodal input and output employing natural language and gestures in virtual environments. On the input side, we describe our approach to recognize and interpret co-verbal gestures used for pointing, object manipulation, and object description. On the output side, we pres...

Executive Summary. This white paper aims at describing the design and evaluation of a new generation of usable and multimodal Requirements and Analysis Tools, capable of promoting artifact co-evolution in a useful manner, enabling cooperation and communication of multiple stakeholders over a common semantic model. The main goal is to leverage the elicitation of functional and nonfunctional requ...

New ways of communication are now possible thanks to adaptive multimodal systems, enabling the improvement in accessibility of ICT applications to all users. We are developing a project which combines TV with a multimodal system in order to overcome accessibility and usability problems by impaired users. This paper is focused on the fission of outputs, and how the presentations of applications ...

We present M3I, an extensive multimodal interaction framework for mobile devices, which simplifies and accelerates the creation of multimodal applications for prototyping and research. It provides an abstraction of information representations in different communication channels, unifies access to implicit and explicit information, and wires together the logic behind context-sensitive modality s...

One of the major scientific goals of SmartKom is to design a new human-machine interaction metaphor for a multimodal dialog system that combines speech, gesture, and mimics input with speech, gesture and graphics output. The system behavior is based on the new situated delegation-oriented dialog paradigm (SDDP) in the sense that a communication assistant, realized as an animated life-like chara...

In the last decades, many efforts have been made to solve multimodal optimization problems using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). To produce good results, these PSO algorithms need to specify some niching parameters to define the local neighborhood. In this paper, our motivation is to propose the novel neighborhood structures that remove undesirable niching parameters without sacrificing perf...

In this paper we will discuss currently available multimodal technologies and how research on the multimodal interfaces can be used to improve human-computer interaction (HCI). We will focus on mechanisms that are used to make communication more natural and accessible for all, and on conceptual barriers that limit the use of multimodality in interface design. We will present CinemaSense as an e...

Software organizations are increasingly relying on cross-organizational and cross-border collaboration, requiring effective coordination of distributed knowledge. However, such coordination is challenging due to spatial separation, diverging communities-of-practice, and unevenly distributed resources. We have therefore studied virtual meetings among the managers of a cross-organizational and cr...

Topics in situated and task oriented communication depend heavily on the given, often changing environment, making the detection of predetermined topics in many cases useless. Detection of non-predefined topics can enhance Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) in a variety of ways, though. In this paper we propose a way to dynamically determine topics during Human-Robot-Communication using well establi...