Call for Chapters for the
Handbook of Research on Multimodal Human Computer Interaction and Pervasive Services: Evolutionary Techniques for Improving Accessibility
Editor: Dr. Patrizia Grifoni, IRPPS-CNR, Italy
Introduction: People usually communicate using all the five senses in parallel. They communicate and interact based on a set of key-concepts that can be expressed with different modalities and/or by means of more than one modality simultaneously. The effectiveness and naturalness of communication is particularly relevant for services. The great diffusion of mobile devices, along with the development of multimodal interaction, presents a new challenge for telecommunication companies and all organizations that can be involved in providing new services using mobile devices. One requirement for these services is that they and their information have to be accessible to every mobile situation.
In the last twenty years, a significant amount of work in human-computer interaction has focused on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and only in recent years has multimodality on mobile devices allowed an implicit and natural interaction between end-users and devices. In fact, the growing development and interest in mobile devices, which now give users the ability to effectively interact anywhere and anytime, has changed this scenario. In particular, mobile multimodal applications must now be able to adapt themselves to the users’ needs and to the context (where the context contains knowledge of the environment and the device) and one or more modalities can be involved in the user-system interaction according to “where” and “when” s/he is.
Multimodal interaction systems combine information provided visually (involving images, text, sketches and so on) by voice, by gestures, and so on according to flexible and powerful dialogue approaches, enabling users to choose one or more interaction modalities. The use of multimodality combined with mobile devices allows a simple, intuitive communication approach and generates new and pervasive services for users. In developing multimodal services it is essential to consider perceptual speech, audio, and video quality for optimum communication system design and effective transmission planning and management in order to satisfy customer requirements. Due to the naturalness of multimodal interaction, interpretation algorithms and technologies must manage uncertainty and ambiguities connected to sequential and simultaneous inputs.
This handbook will collect significant contribution on the theories, techniques and methods on multimodality and mobile devices for pervasive services.
Coverage: The Handbook of Research on Multimodal Human Computer Interaction and Pervasive Services: Evolutionary Techniques for Improving Accessibility will provide complete and original theoretical and practical scenarios about concepts, methodologies, definitions, algorithms and applications used to design and develop multimodal systems. These systems make information and services accessible according to the natural manner provided by multimodal interaction and the use of mobile devices. The handbook will discuss many challenges of multimodal systems with a particular focus on mobile devices. It will give an overview of the existing works in this sector, discussing the different strategies adopted in the fusion process, optimization processes on mobile devices, ambiguity and error handling related to one or more modalities, user modeling and context modeling for enhancing adaptation and context-awareness of multimodal mobile services, which will make them more and more accessible and usable. Moreover, the handbook will contain some significant examples of pervasive multimodal mobile services.
Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Multimodal interaction and pervasive services
Multimodal interaction on mobile devices
Multimodal interfaces and Multimodal interaction languages.
Methods of multimodal integration and algorithms.
Inputs fusion algorithms and approaches.
Fission algorithms and approaches.
Interpretation of multimodal interaction.
Ambiguities and error handling in multimodal interaction.
Computational aspects and optimization for multimodal interaction on mobile devices.
Evaluation of multimodal interfaces.
Adaptivity for multimodal mobile systems: user and context modeling.
Usability evaluation methodologies for pervasive application.
Accessibility evaluation methods for a multimodal and mobile pervasive application.
Applications and services connected to the personal communication, assistive and home market, location based services, e-commerce, online banking, mobile learning etc..
Submission: Individuals interested in submitting chapters (8,000-10,000 words) on the above-suggested topics or other related topics in their area of interest should submit via e-mail a 2-3 page manuscript proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of the proposed chapter by December 18, 2007. We strongly encourage other topics that have not been listed in our suggested list, particularly if the topic is related to the research area in which you have expertise. Upon acceptance of your proposal, you will have until April 30, 2008, to prepare your chapter of 8,000-10,000 words and 7-10 related terms and their appropriate definitions. Guidelines for preparing your paper and terms and definitions will be sent to you upon acceptance of your proposal.
Please forward your e-mail of interest including your name, affiliation and a list of topics (5-7) on which you are interested in writing a chapter to Patrizia Grifoni, editor, at patrizia.grifoni@irpps.cnr.it, no later than December 18, 2007. You will be notified about the status of your proposed topics by January 10, 2008. This book is tentatively scheduled for publishing by Information Science Reference (formerly Idea Group Reference), www.info-sci-ref. com, an imprint of IGI Global (formerly Idea Group, Inc.) in 2009