ICMI 2012 chairs' welcome

Welcome to Santa Monica and to the 14th edition of the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2012. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. We had a record number of submissions this year: 147 (74 long papers, 49 short papers, 5 special session papers and 19 demo papers). From these submissions, we accepted 15 papers for long oral presentation (20.3% acceptance rate), 10 papers for short oral presentation (20.4% acceptance rate) and 19 papers presented as posters. We have a total acceptance rate of 35.8% for all short and long papers. 12 of the 19 demo papers were accepted. All 5 special session papers were directly invited by the organizers and the papers were all accepted. In addition, the program includes three invited Keynote talks. One of the two novelties introduced at ICMI this year is the Multimodal Grand Challenges. 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. This year, we accepted four challenge workshops: the Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge (AVEC), the Haptic Voice Recognition challenge, the D-META challenge and Brain-Computer Interface challenge. Stefanie Telex and Daniel Gatica-Perez are co-chairing the grand challenge this year. All four Grand Challenges will be presented on Monday, October 22nd, and a summary session will be happening on Wednesday, October 24th, afternoon during the main conference. The second novelty at ICMI this year is the Doctoral Consortium—a separate, one-day event to take place on Monday, October 22nd, co-chaired by Bilge Mutlu and Carlos Busso. The goal of the Doctoral Consortium is to provide Ph.D. students with an opportunity to present their work to a group of mentors and peers from a diverse set of academic and industrial backgrounds and institutions, to receive feedback on their doctoral research plan and progress, and to build a cohort of young researchers interested in designing multimodal interfaces. All accepted students receive a travel grant to attend the conference. From among 25 applications, 14 students were accepted for participation and to receive travel funding. The organizers thank the National Science Foundation (award IIS-1249319) and conference sponsors for financial support

The Role of the Doctoral Consortium: An Information Systems Signature Pedagogy?

The doctoral consortium is a well-established, widely endorsed event in the information systems (IS) discipline that occurs adjunct to mainstream IS conferences (e.g., ICIS, ECIS, PACIS, AMCIS). Anecdotal evidence suggests that PhD students’ experience of these events is almost universally positive; some have referred to the events as “life changing” or “magical”. Further, both participating students and scholars strongly perceive the events’ value. To extend the experience to more PhD students, doctoral consortia are more recently being run locally and unaffiliated with any conference. By reviewing the literature and historical documents and conducting a series of interviews and email exchanges with past conference co-chairs, we explore the merits of IS doctoral consortia (consortia). We position the IS doctoral consortium as distinct from forms of doctoral student development in other disciplines, a veritable “signature pedagogy” for IS. In examining the practices and motivations underlying doctoral consortia, we explain related phenomena to improving future consortia. In addition, by appending much historical detail, we add to the IS discipline’s organizational memory

In or Out? Perceptions of Inclusion and Exclusion Among AIS Members

People want a sense of community, a benefit that a professional association such as the Association for Information Systems (AIS) can provide to members. When attempts to create a shared experience fall short and we feel excluded, we disengage and stop further attempts to participate. In this paper, we lay a foundation for individual and association inclusion practices in the AIS. First, we describe the current state of inclusion practices in the academy and in the AIS. Then, we describe findings from a survey of AIS members that measured their perceptions about inclusion and exclusion and factors that cultivated these perceptions. In doing so, we establish a baseline against which we can measure future change. Our data yields key insights about diversity and inclusion in the AIS, and we offer recommendations for all individuals in various roles and positions in the AIS