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News Release - December 20, 2006

Group from Carnegie Mellon, University of Karlsruhe’s InterACT Center Receives Best Exhibit Award at IST 2006

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

Contact:

Anne Watzman
412.268.3830
aw16@andrew.cmu.edu

About Carnegie Mellon: Carnegie Mellon is a private research university with a distinctive mix of programs in engineering, computer science, robotics, business, public policy, fine arts and the humanities. More than 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students receive an education characterized by its focus on creating and implementing solutions for real problems, interdisciplinary collaboration, and innovation. A small student-to-faculty ratio provides an opportunity for close interaction between students and professors. While technology is pervasive on its 144-acre Pittsburgh campus, Carnegie Mellon is also distinctive among leading research universities for the world-renowned programs in its College of Fine Arts. A global university, Carnegie Mellon has campuses in Silicon Valley, Calif., and Qatar, and programs in Asia, Australia and Europe. For more, see www.cmu.edu.