About the Cluster of Excellence

The Excellence Initiative spearheaded by the German federal and state governments aims to allow more worldclass research in Germany in the coming years. To this end funding of 1.9 billion Euros is being made available nationwide up to the year 2011. These funds should contribute to enhancing the international competitiveness of German universities.
In a multiple-stage process in 2007 the international jury appointed by the DFG (German Research Foundation) made funding awards available in response to both the application for a Cluster of Excellence on the topic „Multimodal Computing and Interaction“ in Saarbrücken and the concept of an international Graduate School for Computer Science. Together the two projects will receive funding of about 40 million Euros from the federal and state governments between 2008 and 2012.

Dawn of the Information Society

The outpoint for the Cluster of Excellence is the observation that the past three decades have brought dramatic changes in the way we live and work. This phenomenon is widely characterized as the advent of the Information Society.

Ten years ago, most digital content was textual. Today, it has expanded to include audio, video, and graphical data. The challenge is now to organize,  understand, and search this multimodal information in a robust, efficient and intelligent way, and to create dependable systems that allow natural and intuitive multimodal interaction.

The Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction addresses this challenge. The term multimodal describes the different kinds of information such as text, speech, images, video, graphics, and high-dimensional data, and the way it is perceived and communicated, particularly through vision, hearing, and human expression.

Multimodal Processing and Interaction

Daily interpersonal communication is based on a wide range of different modalities. Our first goal is to enable natural multimodal interaction with information systems anytime and anywhere, exploiting the wealth of modalities present in everyday human-to-human interaction. The systems must be aware of each user’s environment and situation, must react to speech, text, and gestures, and must respond with speech, text, video, virtual 3D environments
and virtual characters.
Our second goal is to enhance the ability of computer systems to acquire, process, and present different modes of data in an efficient and robust way. We aim for systems that can analyze and interpret multimodal information even when it is large, distributed, noisy and possibly incomplete; that can organize the obtained knowledge for powerful querying. We refer to this type of computing as multimodal computing.

We have five years of highly interesting research ahead of us with fascinating questions and enormous potential for applications.