ANNUAL REPORT

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON MULTIMEDIA LANGUAGE PROCESSING

(SIGMEDIA)

June 11th 2002

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 an official sponsor of three scientific events.

SIGMedia has been serving as a sponsor of the second Conference on Computational Semiotics for Games and New Media which will take place in Augsburg (Germany) on September 2nd - 4th, 2002. It is a cross-disciplinary conference that explores the ways in which semiotics can be applied to creating and analysing computer-based media. The organizers of the Conference are: Elisabeth Andre (Universitat Augsburg, Germany, Andy Clarke (Kinonet, UK), Clive Fencott (University of Teeside, UK), Craig Lindley (Interactive Institute, Sweden), Grethe Mitchell (University of East London and Kinonet, UK) and Frank Nack (CWI, Netherlands). The URL of the workshop is: http://www.kinonet.com/conferences/cosign2002

SIGMedia is also involved in a joint activity with the ACL Special Interest Group SIGDial. Both of them support the International Speech Communication Association with the preparation of the ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Spoken Dialogue in Mobile Environments. The workshop will take place at Kloster Irsee, Germany from June 17-21, 2002. The organizers of the workshop are: Paul Heisterkamp and Wolfgang Minker, both DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany, Laila Dybkjaer, University of Southern Denmark and Elisabeth Andre, University of Augsburg, Germany. The URL of the workshop is: http://www.sigmedia.org/ids02/

Together with MITRE, SIGMedia has been serving as a co-sponsor of the ACL Workshop on Temporal and Spatial Information Processing which took place in Toulouse on July 7th 2001. The organizers of the workshop were: Lisa Harper, MITRE, USA, Inderjeet Mani, MITRE and Georgetown University, USA and Beth Sundheim, SPAWAR Systems Center, USA.

COOPERATIONS WITH OTHER NETWORKS AND INSTITUTIONS:

SIGMedia members have been involved in a number of Expressions of Interest (EoI) proposals for Networks of Excellence devoted to natural-language processing in multimedia applications that have been invited by the European Commission. SIGMEDIA also intends to establish links to the FET Convivio Network which is currently under negotiation and will become the successor of i3net (www.i3net.org/) with which we had a number of common interests.