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ICMI 2012: CALL FOR MULTIMODAL GRAND CHALLENGES 
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Multimodal technologies are fundamentally changing the ways people interact with each other and 
with computers. Multimodal systems - that recognize language and nonverbal behavior exchanged 
among people or as input to interfaces in physical environments or mobile devices - or that 
generate multimodal behaviors - may facilitate and enrich social interactions and allow people to 
naturally interact with computer systems with minimal training, for domains such as communications,
education, entertainment, and robotics.

Developing systems that can robustly understand human-human communication or respond to human 
input requires identifying the best algorithms and their failure modes. In fields such as computer 
vision, speech recognition, and computational linguistics, the availability of datasets and common 
tasks have led to great progress. We invite the ICMI community to collectively define and tackle 
the scientific Grand Challenges in our domain for the next 5 years. Multimodal Grand Challenges 
are driven by ideas that are bold, innovative, and inclusive. They should inspire new ideas in the 
ICMI community and create momentum for future collaborative work. Analysis, synthesis, and
interactive tasks are all possible.

We are seeking organizers to propose and run Grand Challenge events. Both academic and corporate 
organizers are welcome. We are looking for three types of challenges:

* Dataset-driven challenge:

   This challenge will provide a dataset
   that is exemplary of the complexities of current and future
   multimodal problems, and one or more multimodal tasks whose
   performance can be objectively measured. Participants in the
   Challenge will evaluate their methods against the challenge data in
   order to identify areas of strengths and weakness.

* User case challenge:

   This challenge will provide an interactive
   problem/system (e.g. dialog-based) and the associated resources,
   which can allow people to participate through the integration of
   specific modules or alternative full systems. Proposers should also
   establish systematic evaluation procedures.

* Concept challenge.

   This challenge proposes new ideas (e.g. involving
   new sensors) that, while not fully tested now, could lead to
   breakthroughs if our community decided to tackle them together or
   individually.

Prospective organizers should submit a proposal (five pages max) containing the following information:

* Title
* Abstract appropriate for possible Web promotion of the Challenge
* Detailed description of the challenge and its relevance to  multimodal interaction.
* Plan for soliciting participation
* Proposed schedule for releasing datasets and receiving submissions.
* Short bio of the organizers
* Funding source (if any) that supports or  could support the challenge organization.
* Preference (if any) for special session or workshop format.

Proposals will be evaluated based on originality, ambition, feasibility, and implementation plan. The ICMI organizers offer support with basic logistics and with the identification of additional funding sources (e.g. for awards).  Proposals should be emailed to the ICMI 2012 Challenge Co-Chairs. Prospective organizers are also encouraged to contact them in case of questions.  More information is available on the ICMI website: http://www.acm.org/icmi/2012/.

Important dates:

We will evaluate proposals on a rolling basis. Proposals can be submitted as soon as possible, no 
later than December 22nd, 2011.
Notifications will be sent on January 10th, 2012.
ICMI 2012 Conference: October 22nd-26th, 2012.

ICMI 2012 Multimodal Grand Challenge Chairs:

*   Daniel Gatica-Perez (Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland):
      gatica@idiap.ch
*   Stephanie Tellex (MIT, USA):
      stefie10@csail.mit.edu