Publisher's Synopsis
What are eNTERFACE workshops?The eNTERFACE summer workshops, organized by the SIMILAR European Network of Excellence, are a new type of European workshops. They aim at establishing a tradition of collaborative, localized research and development work by gathering, in a single place, a group of senior project leaders, researchers, and (undergraduate) students, working together on a pre-specified list of challenges, for 4 weeks. Participants are organized in teams, attached to specific projects related to multimodal interfaces, working on free software.eNTERFACE'05 was held at Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium, in July-August 2005. The eNTERFACE'06 workshop will be organized in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in July-August 2006.What do eNTERFACE workshops produce as results?At the end of the workshop, a public presentation day is organized, in which the team leaders explain and demonstrate the results of their project. A press conference is also organized, to maximally publicize the event. All results, codes and data, are then made publicly available with an MIT-like open source license.Last but not least, the workshop proceedings are produced 6 weeks after the end of the workshop, in which each team contributes a 15pp. paper on the project they had to study, the related stateof-the-art-of-the art, the problems encountered, and the solution(s) proposed and implemented.But still more importantly, eNTERFACE workshops create a real transfer of know-how among participants, who continue to work together after the workshop has closed. They actively contribute to building the European Research Area, by establishing a tradition of localized collaborative research.The eNTERFACE funding modelNo funding is provided by the organizers for researchers, but no registration fees are asked for either. Participants therefore have to pay for their travel, lodging, and catering expenses, using their SIMILAR finances or other EU, national, or regional funding. Catering and lodging is available from the University organizing the workshop, at minimal student rates. Some grants are available from scientific societies.A limited number of undergraduate students (typ. 10) are also selected (based on their CV and recommendations from professors), whose travel and accomodation expenses are paid by the organizers.
