Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Multimodal interfaces in semantic interaction

It is our pleasure to welcome you to Nagoya and the WMISI 2007, the Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces in Semantic Interaction. With the advances in ubiquitous networks, data mining, communication robots, and sensing technologies, various information on the real world has become available in real time. This information, presented to the user, not only makes it possible to support his or her intellectual activities but may also be utilized as context, thus opening great possibilities of achieving situated intelligent functions. The information systems and robots that support human activities in everyday life should ideally have functions that allow them to interact with humans adaptively according to context, such as the situation in the real world and each human's individual characteristics. For instance, these functions might include the ability to understand the user's intention through his or her utterances, as well as the ability to provide suitable information at appropriate timing. In order to realize such interaction ---as semantic interaction--- it is necessary to extract and use the valuable context information needed for understanding interaction from the obtained real-world information. This context information is multimodal information at several levels: 1) raw information obtained from sensors, 2) information obtained through categorization, and 3) the relationships between categories. In semantic interaction, it is important for the user and the machine to share knowledge and an understanding of a given situation. Thus, it is necessary to infer the user's intention and to represent the machine's inner state naturally through speech, images, graphics, manipulators, and so on. This is achieved based on the multimodal context information. Accordingly, the development of multimodal interfaces is a very important research theme. After reviewing the submitted papers, this proceedings finally contain 11 high-quality papers. Of these, five are long papers and six are short papers.