IMIX: Good Questions, Promising Answers

Abstract

The IMIX Programme was designed as a coordinated framework for addressing the difficult problems that arise in integrated multimedia information delivery. The programme, carried out by research teams in the Netherlands, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, was very ambitious, combining research on automatic speech recognition within the context of multimodal interaction, dialogue management and reasoning, information presentation in multimodal systems, and information extraction. It managed to strengthen multidisciplinary collaboration, knowledge transfer between academia and industry, and the position of the Dutch language in the information society. The IMIX Demonstrator improved the visibility of language and speech technology as enabler of advanced information services. A follow-up research programme should include both a common framework, containing data, tasks, and evaluation, as well as a serious human factors evaluation component. Interactions and synergies between participants from areas that approach human communications from different angles should be actively encouraged.