Smartkom : Foundations of Multimodal Dialogue Systems

The result of four years of intensive research in a large multimodal dialogue project involving 12 partners from academia and industry, SmartKom is one of the most advanced multimodal dialogue systems worldwide and is a landmark project in the history of intelligent user interfaces. The system provides symmetric multimodality in a mixed-initiative dialogue system with an embodied conversational agent. The same software architecture and components are used in three fully operational application scenarios. The theoretical and practical foundations of SmartKom represent a new generation of multimodal dialogue systems that deal not only with simple modality integration and synchronization, but cover the full spectrum of multimodal dialogue. With contributions by leading scientists in the field, this book gives the first comprehensive overview of the results of this seminal project.

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster is the Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and a Professor of Computer Science at the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. In 2000, he was coopted as a Professor of Computational Linguistics at the same university. In addition, he is the Head of the Intelligent User Interfaces Lab at DFKI.

He was the Scientific Director of the Verbmobil consortium on spontaneous speech translation (1993-2000), the SmartKom consortium on multimodal dialog systems (1999-2003), and the SmartWeb consortium on mobile multimodal access to semantic web services (2004-2008).

He has authored more than 150 technical papers and 6 books on language technology and intelligent user interfaces, and edited many books, among them the Springer titles "Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation", "SmartKom: Foundations of Multimodal Dialogue Systems", and "SemProM: Foundations of Semantic Product Memories for the Internet of Things". His research includes multimodal and perceptive user interfaces, user modeling, embodied conversational agents, smart navigation systems, semantic web services, and resource-adaptive cognitive technologies.

He was awarded the Deutscher Zukunftspreis (German Future Award) in 2001 and he received the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class, the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2006.

He is the Chief Academic Advisor for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the Research Union of the German Government, he is a member or chair of many key international scientific advisory and governance boards, including the National Institute of Informatics (NII) of Japan, the jury for the European ICT Prize of the European Commission, the SingaporeAgency for Science, Technology and Research, the SAP Next Business & Technology Advisory Board, the Center for Advanced Security Research in Darmstadt, the Intel Visual Computing Institute, the Fondazione Bruno Kessler, and the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership of the European Commission.

He is a member of many academies, including the German Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Acatech, the Council for Engineering Sciences of the Union of German Academies of Science and Humanities, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

He has chaired and given invited talks at the key international conferences in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, he is a board member of the key AI journals, and he is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), and the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI).