We invite you to submit a paper to The 1st International Conference on Speech and Multimodal Interaction in Assistive Environments (SMIAE 2012): http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/smiae/2012/ , to be held at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (http://www.acl2012.org/), on July 8th - 14th, 2012, in Jeju, Republic of Korea.

This workshop will focus on issues, applications, and development tools in the field of Speech and Multimodal Interaction in Assistive Environments (SMIAE). It will be concerned with all topics which fit within the purview of speech and multimodal communication in environments suitable for the elderly and people with age-related physical or cognitive disabilities. Assistive environments are an application area of the research field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). This research field is supported through a European technology and innovation funding programme, which promotes intelligent assistant systems for a better, healthier, and safer life in the preferred living environments through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Human-computer and human-robot interaction are key technological tools in the area of Assistive Environments, and as such the workshop will particularly aim to draw together speech and multimodal work in these areas. Moreover, both theoretical and applied computational work regarding multimodal interaction in assistive environments will be welcome at this workshop.

The submissions deadline is March 18th, 2011 (Check the website on Important Dates for notification to authors and camera ready deadlines).
Submissions for long or short papers are both accepted. Both kinds of submissions will have the same reviewing process and the accepted papers will be included in the same proceedings. Submissions must conform to the official ACL 2012 style guidelines here and should be submitted through the START system.

Suggested Major Areas or Tracks are the following:
Speech-enabled systems in assisted living environments
Speech in interaction with gesture and other modalities in assistive environments
Speech and multimodality in assistive robotics
Control of smart devices through speech and multimodal approaches
Speech/Text-to Speech software in Web applications designed for the elderly
Speech and multimodal interaction in e-Government and e-Health in assistive environments
Communication in assistive environments (e.g. Peer-to-Peer)
Talking agents in assistive environments
Multimodal ICT used in elder care

All Submitted papers will go through double-blind reviewing processes (at least three reviewers). Authors of accepted papers who registered in the conference will have access to the evaluations and possible feedback provided by the reviewers who recommended the acceptance of their papers, so they can accordingly improve the final version of their papers.

For any questions, feedback or comments, feel free to contact the organization committee at smiae2012@informatik.uni-bremen.de


SMIAE 2012 organising committee,
Dimitra Anastasiou,
Desislava Zhekova
Cui Jian
Robert Ross