| So the main challenge is to improve the ease of use of new technologies in computer-mediated environments in order to turn smart surroundings into habitable environments. Our home, office, mobile and public environments will increasingly be equipped with smart hardware and software devices, including mobile robots, virtual humans, smart furniture and various sorts of digital assistants that provide real-time support of our activities (work, entertainment, leisure, family, social events, etc.). To maximize their benefit for the user, such environments need to allow easy and transparent interactions with the user and between the users, and to be capable of interpreting, predicting and reacting to user s current and future activities and interests, respectively. Natural and intuitive interaction requires research into verbal and nonverbal communication issues, modality allocation and integration, and user profiles. Information access addresses the challenges of problem-, context- and user-centric interpretation, filtering, delivery and exchange of information generated in or communicated through the environment. Here, research is required on multimodal data storage and processing (e.g. restoration, enhancement and compression), on content-based multimodal data analysis and indexing, as well as on quality of service (QoS) in relation to content exchange and delivery. Syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of multimodal input and multimedia data can take place in a static (off-line) or dynamic (online) context. In the former case the emphasis is on providing intelligent access (retrieval) to stored multimedia, where intelligent stands mainly for context awareness and personalization. In the latter case we have multimodal interaction with reactive and pro-active smart environments and devices. Here, the multimedia content analysis as well as mixed reality and virtual humans are among the research topics addressed. |
