Call for Participation

The NUMEDIART Institute for Creative Technology of University of Mons, Belgium, invites researchers to join eNTERFACE?15, the 11th one-month Summer Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces, to be held in Mons, Belgium, the European Capital of Culture 2015, from August 10th to September 4th, 2015.

eNTERFACE workshops gather in a single place a team of senior project leaders, researchers, and students, to work on a pre-specified list of challenges for 4 weeks. Participants are organized in teams, each team being attached to a specific project.

If you are a senior/junior researcher or a PhD/MS/undergraduate student working on similar topics and you want to collaborate in (at least) one of these projects, please fill out the online registration form. You will be asked to upload a short CV in electronic format (doc, docx or pdf) along with a list of skills you can offer to the selected project teams. You can choose up to three projects. The project leaders will select their team members among the applicants.

The workshop attendance is free of charge but participants must fund their own travel, accommodation, and living expenses. The estimated costs are as follows :

• Accommodation in single bedrooms in the University Residence Hall costs from 285? to 329?, (depending on bedclothes renting or not), per person for the whole one-month stay.
• Meals (in the city) will cost about 400? for the 4 weeks, but this can be reduced by about a half if you eat at the university canteen at lunch time and cook for yourself at the dorm for dinner.

What are eNTERFACE workshops?

The eNTERFACE workshops aim at establishing a tradition of collaborative, localized research and development work by gathering, in a single place, a team of leading professionals in multimodal human-machine interfaces together with students (both graduate and undergraduate), to work on a prespecified list of challenges, for 4 complete weeks. In this respect, it is an innovative and intensive collaboration scheme, designed to allow researchers to integrate their software tools, deploy demonstrators, collect novel databases, and work side by side with a great number of experts. It brings together 80 researchers for a whole month, subsequently it is the largest summer workshop on multimodal interfaces.

The workshop is held on an annual basis and organized around several research projects dealing with multimodal human-machine interfaces design. It is thus radically different from traditional scientific workshops, in which only specialists meet for a few days to discuss state-of-the art problems, but do not really work together.

The eNTERFACE was initiated by the FP6 Network of Excellence SIMILAR. After the completion of SIMILAR, the workshop continued to attract wide interest under the aegis of the OpenInterface Foundation. It was organized by Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium) in 2005, University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2006, Bogaziçi University (Turkey) in 2007, CNRS-LIMSI (France) in 2008, University of Genova (Italy) in 2009, University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in 2010, University of West Bohemia (Czech Republic) in 2011, Metz Supélec (France) in 2012, New University of Lisbon (Portugal) in 2013, and University of Basque Country (Spain) in 2014.

How does it work?

1. Experienced researchers are invited to propose research projects to be undertaken by a few people (5-10) during 4 weeks. The proposal should explain what to do, how many people are necessary, profile of these people, etc.
2. Once the projects have been supervised and approved by the technical committee, they are listed on this website.
3. Then there is a call for participation (*this email*): students/researchers from all around the world send their CVs and choose the project they prefer according to their expertise or interest.
4. Teams are built by the project leaders in cooperation with the organizers according to the preferences of the students/researchers and their suitability for the project.
5. Finally, the team members come to Mons and spend four wonderful and productive weeks together. There is no registration fee for participants and accommodation will be relatively cheap.

Organizers

eNTERFACE?15 is organized by the University of Mons (UMONS), and it will take place at the Faculty of Engineering (FPMs) of Mons, Belgium.

The team undertaking eNTERFACE 2015 is part of the NUMEDIART Institute for Creative Technology, with inter­na­tion­ally recog­nised appraisal in the field of sound, image, video, ges­tures and biosig­nals pro­cess­ing for appli­ca­tions where human-computer inter­ac­tion aims to prompt emotion.

The city of Mons, cultural capital of Wallonia, has been chosen as European Capital of Culture 2015.

For the eNTERFACE 2015 organizing committee,

Prof. T. Dutoit

Main Chair