The Association for Interactive Multimodal Information Management (AIM2) is concerned with the field of natural multimodal interfaces for human-computer interaction and related interactive systems operating over multimedia data. By “multimodal” we mean the different technologies that coordinate natural input modes (such as speech, pen, touch, hand gestures, head and body movements, and eventually physiological sensors) with multimedia system output (such as speech, sound, images, or video). Multimodal interfaces should flexibly accommodate a wide range of users, tasks, and environments for which any single mode may not suffice. The ideal interface should primarily be able to deal with more comprehensive and realistic forms of data, including mixed data types (i.e., data from different input modalities such as image and audio).

AIM2 is also concerned with the domain of computer-enhanced human-to-human interaction. Indeed, understanding human-human interaction is fundamental to the long-term pursuit of powerful and natural multimodal interfaces for human-computer interaction. In addition to making rich, socially-enhanced analyses of group process ripe for exploitation, our advances in speech, image, video, and language processing, as well as the tools for working with multimodal data, will improve research and development in many related areas.

The field of multimodal interaction covers a wide range of critical activities and applications, including recognition and interpretation of spoken, written and gestural language, particularly when used as an interface to multimedia information systems, and biometric user authentication (protecting information access). Further, management of multimedia information systems is a wide-ranging and important research area that includes not only the study of multimodal interaction as described above, but also multimedia document analysis, indexing, and information retrieval. The development of this technology is necessarily a multi-disciplinary undertaking, requiring the collaborative contributions of experts in engineering and computer science, but also from the social sciences, psychology and linguistics.