Special issue on multimodal interfaces in cognitive infocommunication systems

Abstract

Humans and the infocommunications network surrounding them are merging together at various levels, ranging from the level of interactions with personal devices to the highest level of sensing collective behaviors such as mass movements, mass habits etc. Consequently, humans and infocommunications will soon coexist as an entangled web, resulting in an augmentation and merging of both natural and artificial cognitive capabilities. This process of merging is occurring today, and is expected to gain further impact in the near future. Cognitive infocommunications (CogInfoCom) is an interdisciplinary field that aims to reflect on this process of merging by investigating links between the research areas of infocommunications and the cognitive sciences, as well as the various engineering applications that have emerged as the synergic combination of these sciences. Given the interdisciplinary background of CogInfoCom, many aspects of the synergies behind it can be considered. The papers in this special issue all focus on some aspect of multimodal interfaces in the context of infocommunication systems that enable enhanced cognitive capabilities through the merging of the natural and artificial. Papers range from the more theoretical to those which introduce practical applications. Several papers address multi-modal aspects of human speech. The paper by A. Abuczki focuses on a multi-modal corpus based approach to modeling cognitive, information and interactional states behind speech interactions, basedon a set of discoursemarkers and hand-based gestures. The papers