Informatik 2009: Im Focus das Leben, Beiträge der 39. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), 28.9.-2.10.2009, Lübeck, Deutschland, Proceedings

The past three decades have brought dramatic changes in the way we live and work. This phenomenon is widely characterized as the advent of the Information Society. Ten years ago, most digital content was textual. Today, it has expanded to include audio, video, and graphical data. The challenge is now to organize, understand, and search this multimodal information in a robust, efficient and intelligent way, and to create dependable systems that allow natural and intuitive multimodal interaction. The Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction, established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative, addresses this challenge. The term multimodal describes the different kinds of information such as text, speech, images, video, graphics, and highdimensional data, and the way it is perceived and communicated, particularly through vision, hearing, and human expression. The cluster comprises the Computer Science and Computational Linguistics and Phonetics departments of Saarland University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, and the newly established Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. An integral goal of our cluster is the promotion of young researchers, and as such, we will commit the majority of the requested funding to the establishment of junior research groups.