What's eNTERFACE?
The eNTERFACE workshops aim at establishing
a tradition of collaborative, localized research and development work by gathering, in a single place,
a team of leading professionals in multimodal human-machine interfaces together with students (both
graduate and undergraduate), to work on a prespecified list of challenges, for 4 complete weeks.
In this respect, it is an innovative and intensive collaboration scheme, designed to allow researchers
to integrate their software tools, deploy demonstrators, collect novel databases, and work side by side
with a great number of experts. It brings together 80 researchers for a whole month, subsequently it is
the largest workshop on multimodal interfaces.
The workshop is held on an anual basis and organized around several research projects dealing with multimodal human-machine interfaces design. It is thus radically different from traditional scientific workshops, in which only specialists meet for a few days to discuss state-of-the art problems, but do not really work together.
The eNTERFACE was initiated by the FP6 Network of Excellence SIMILAR. After the completion of SIMILAR, the workshop continued to attract wide interest under the aegis of the OpenInterface Foundation. It was organized by Faculté Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium) in 2005, University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2006, Bogaziçi University (Turkey) in 2007, CNRS-LIMSI (France) in 2008, University of Genova (Italy) in 2009, University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in 2010, University of West Bohemia (Czech Republic) in 2011, Metz Supélec (France) in 2012, and Lisboa (Portugal) in 2013.
How does it work?
- Experienced researchers are invited to propose research projects to be undertaken by a few people (5-10) during 4 weeks. The proposal should explain what to do, how many people are necessary, profile of these people, etc.
- Once the projects have been supervised and approved by the technical committee, they are listed on this website.
- Then there is a call for participation: students/researchers from all around the world send their CVs and choose the project they prefer according to their expertise or interest.
- Teams are built by the project leaders in cooperation with the organizers according to the preferences of the students/researchers and their suitability for the project.
- Finally, the team members come to Bilbao and spend four wonderful and productive weeks together. There is no registration fee for participants and accommodation will be relatively cheap.
Organizers
eNTERFACE'14 is organized by the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), and it will take place at the Faculty of Technical Engineering of Bilbao, Spain.
The University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) is a teaching and research institution founded in 1985. It employs over 7000 people throughout 31 faculties and schools, with over 50000 students. It is the Spanish University offering the highest number of degrees, one third of which have a quality mention and have been recognised as International Excellence Campus by the Spanish Government.
The team undertaking eNTERFACE 2014, AHOLAB, is a Consolidated Research Group from the Basque Research Network. Since 1992, it has conducted research on all areas of speech technologies, with emphasis on speech synthesis. It is the reference lab in the development of speech technologies and generation of resources for the Basque language. The AHOLAB team includes 4 faculty members (1 professor), 1 Ikerbasque research fellow, 4 Ph.D. and M.Sc. students, and 1 full-time research engineer.
