IS2011 Student Event Report : Multimedia and Multimodal Interaction

It is really an amazing experience to attend Interspeech2011 in
Florence. Also the student lunch event was so productive and
interesting. We met the famous researchers in similar or same fields.
   The experts of our table are Prof. Helen Meng and Prof. Andrea
Paoloni. The students of this table include Arindam Ghosh from
University of Trento, Janto Skowronek from Technical University Berlin
- Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Senaka Amarakeerthi from University
of Aizu, Sourish Chaudhuri from CMU whom I met in the Uffizi Gallery
the other day, Weiwu Jiang from CUHK, Zhanyu Ma from Royal Institute
of Technology whom I will meet in Beijing in the workshop of MLSP2011
next week, and me, Ziqiang Shi from HIT.
The experts first ask all the students of our table to introduce the
research fields and interests. Then they consider all the research
interests and fields of the students, and suggest the theme "What is
multimodal?" to discuss. We have a warm discussion on this question.
Prof. Helen Meng and Andrea Paoloni thought that multimodal provides
two level meanings that are input and output. Prof. Helen Meng said
that generally the multimodal systems present users with multimedia
displays and multimodal output, primarily in the form of visual and
auditory cues. She said that interface designers have also started to
make use of other modalities, such as touch and olfaction. The team of
Prof. Helen Meng is doing some work on map search. She gave an example
that they use text and gesture input of the destination to the map
engine. You directly point to the destination, and the engine told you
how to get it. That helps a lot.
Janto now is doing some work on communication. He thought that
multimodal means multiple one-one communication methods. Thus we agree
multimodal related to three facts: input, output, and communication.
Although multimodal is very useful in real-life, Zhanyu Ma said there
are many question in multimodal. For example in multimodal
communication, the receipt needs to decode what the multimodal is in
the input.
The good time is always short. In this one hour discussion, we benefit
a lot. Thanks for the ISCA to hold such an event; it is so interesting
and productive. It provides an opportunity to communicate with the
peer researchers. Almost all the students in our table become friends
and keep in touch the conference. It also give us the platform to
discuss with the famous professors which is really a wonderful
experience.

Report written by ZiQiang Shi