A German-based project team in the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT), a partnership of Carnegie Mellon and the University of Karlsruhe (Germany) headed by LTI Professor Alex Waibel, received one of three "best exhibit" awards at the 2006 IST conference held in Nov. 21-23 in Helsinki, Finland.

IST-Information Society Technologies-is a research program funded by the European Union. More than 4,500 visitors attended the 2006 conference, which is held biannually at sites around the world.

The InterACT team's award-winning papers and exhibits were developed around project CHIL-Computers in the Human Interaction Loop-whose focus is to enhance personal interaction with the support of computers- at work, in meetings or at lectures. To do this, computers must perceive and understand human activities, communication and intent.

InterACT was established in 2004 to support human-to-human interaction across language and cultural barriers, and to do research in pervasive multimodal and multilingual computing environments. InterACT is a partner in two large research collaborations funded by the European Union and corporate sponsors. One is CHIL in which Carnegie Mellon researchers are also partners. The other is TC-STAR, which focuses on domain-unlimited speech-to-speech translation.

For more information on CHIL, see http://chil.server.de.

For more information InterACT, see www.is.cs.cmu.edu/interact.

For more information on the IST Conference, see:http://europa.eu.int/information_society/istevent/2006/index_en.htm