Designing Speech and Multimodal Interactions for Mobile, Wearable, & Pervasive Applications

CHI 2016 Workshop, San Jose, CA

Call for Papers

This workshop aims to develop speech and multimodal interaction as a well-established area of study within HCI, aiming to leverage current engineering advances in ASR, NLP, TTS, multimodal/gesture recognition, or brain-computer interfaces. In return, advances in HCI can contribute to creating NLP and ASR algorithms that are informed by and better address the usability challenges of speech and multimodal interfaces. We also aim to increase the cohesion between research currently dispersed across many areas including HCI, wearable design, ASR, NLP, BCI complementing speech, EMG interaction and eye-gaze input. Our hope is that by focusing and challenging the research community on multi-input modalities for wearables, we will energize the CHI and engineering communities to push the boundaries of what is possible with wearable, mobile, and pervasive computing, but also make advances in each of the respective communities.

Our goal is to create, through an interdisciplinary dialogue, momentum for increased research and collaboration in:

  • Formally framing the challenges to the widespread adoption of speech and natural language interaction,

  • Taking concrete steps toward developing a framework of user-centric design guidelines for speech- and language-based interactive systems, grounded in good usability practices,

  • Establishing directions to take and identifying further research opportunities in designing more natural interactions that make use of speech and natural language, and

  • Identifying key challenges and opportunities for enabling and designing multi-input modalities for a wide range of wearable device classes

We invite the submission of position papers demonstrating research, design, practice, or interest in areas related to speech, language, and multimodal interaction that address one or more of the workshop goals, with an emphasis, but not limited to, applications such as mobile, wearable, or pervasive computing.

Position papers should be 4 to 6 pages long, in the ACM SIGCHI extended abstract format and include a brief statement justifying the fit with the workshop's topic. Summaries of previous research are welcome if they contribute to the workshop's multidisciplinary goals (e.g. a speech processing research in clear need of HCI expertise). Submissions will be reviewed according to:

  • Fit with the workshop topic

  • Potential to contribute to the workshop goals

  • A demonstrated track of research in the workshop area (HCI or speech/multimodal processing, with an interest in both areas).

Important Dates:

  • January 13th, 2016: Submission of position papers

  • January 20th, 2016: Notification of acceptance

  • February 10th, 2016: Submission of camera-ready accepted papers