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 interfaces together with students (both graduate and undergraduate), to work on a prespecified list of challenges, for 4 complete weeks.

The workshop is held on a yearly basis, in July-August, 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 senior reseachers are mainly members of the SIMILAR Network of Excellence, together with other university professors and industrial and governmental researchers presently working in widely dispersed locations. A small number (usually 7-9) of  undergraduates are also selected through an open Call for Participation, set on outstanding academic promise. About thirty graduate students familiar with the field are selected in accordance with their demonstrated performance.

Participants are organized into teams, one per project, which are constituted several months before the workshop during the first organizational day. R&D challenges will focus on themes related to the special interest groups of the SIMILAR network of excellence, that is:

• Multimodal signal analysis and synthesis
• Fusion and fission of modalities
• Context aware adaptation
• Edutainment and learning assistance
• Medical applications
• Disabled applications
• Usability