In the past twenty years, computers and networks have gained a prominent role in supporting human communications. This constitutes one of the most remarkable departures from their initial role as processors of large amounts of numeric data, in business or science, or as controllers of repetitive industrial operations. However, to offer truly innovative support to human communications, computers had to demonstrate that they could achieve more than what telephone calls or videoconferencing could

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... o. Thanks to research in the past decade, a convincing case has been made for the capability of information and communication technology to do justice to one of the richest aspects of human communication: its multimodal nature. Humans generate meaningful communicative actions with far more means than only pronouncing or writing words. Individuals words are put together in sentences and dialogues, accompanied by nuances of tone and pace, face expressions and gestures. Utterances from different speakers build together complex, multimodal interaction patterns which are some of the richest, yet natural social activities. This book is an attempt to answer the questions: what is required from computer hardware and software to support such activities? What are the capabilities of current technology, and what can be achieved using it? This book takes a strong stance. We posit that research in interactive multimodal information management by computers makes quicker progress when it is driven by a clear application goal, which not only provides concrete