Human Interaction with Machines

The International Workshop on “Human Interaction with Machines” is the sixth in a successful series of workshops that were established by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Technische Universität Berlin. The goal of those workshops is to bring together researchers from both universities in order to present research results to an international community…
The series of workshops started in 1990 with the International Workshop on “Artificial Intelligence” and was continued with the International Workshop on “Advanced Software Technology” in 1994. Both workshops have been hosted by Shanghai Jiaotong University. In 1998 the third workshop took place in Berlin. This International Workshop on “Communication Based Systems” was essentially based on results from the Graduiertenkolleg on Communication Based Systems that was funded by the German Research Society (DFG) from 1991 to 2000. The fourth International Workshop on “Robotics and its Applications” was held in Shanghai in 2000. The fifth International Workshop on “The Internet Challenge: Technology and Applications” was hosted by TU Berlin in 2002.

The subject of this year’s workshop has been chosen because both universities have recognized that human interaction with machines in different application fields has become a major issue. Highly sophisticated devices like video recorders, mobile phones, digital cameras, and all the nice infotainment equipment in modern cars offer a great amount of functionality and comfort – but almost nobody is really able to use more than a tiny part of their functionality. The manuals to operate those devices are often bigger in size and weight than the devices themselves. The same applies to services that are offered in the web or by telecommunication providers. Only few persons even know about the complex features offered by those systems. Similar and even more difficult problems arise if we think of robots or medical devices that should be used as helpmates directly in con tact with handicapped or elderly persons.

To overcome those problems intelligent systems have to be designed that derive their behavior at least partially by observing human behavior, learning from it, but also guaranteeing safety requirements. So the interfaces must take into account more modalities than currently involved in human machine interaction as e.g. visual information, natural language, gestures, but also physiological data like EEG, ECG, and EMG.

All those aspects of human interaction or even cooperation with machines are addressed in this workshop. The continuous support of both universities is gratefully recognized that enabled the permanent exchange of ideas between researchers of our two universities.