ACM Workshop on Effective Telepresence: Toward Seamless Remote Interaction and Experience http://ame.asu.edu/etp2004 New York, New York, October 15 2004. in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2004 http://www.acm.org/sigmm/mm2004
	Organizers Gopal Pingali, IBM Research Frank Nack, CWI Hari Sundaram, Arizona State U.  Program Committee H. Harlyn Baker, HP Labs Susanne Boll, Univ of Oldenburg Shih-Fu Chang, Columbia University Ross Cutler, Microsoft Research Ajay Divakaran, Mitsubishi  Research, Alexandros Eleftheriadis, Columbia U. Gary Elko, Avaya Labs Kicha Ganapathy, Rutgers Univerity Austin Henderson, Pitney Bowes Ramesh Jain , Georgia Tech. Fred Juang, Georgia Tech. Craig Lindley, Interactive Institute P.J. Narayanan, IIIT Agata Opalach, Accenture Labs Peter Parnes, Lulea University Martin Reiser, Inst. for Media Comm. Nicolas Roussel, Universite Paris-Sud Oliver Schreer, Heinrich-Hertz Inst. Cyrus Shahabi, U. Southern California Nicolas Tsingos, INRIA Greg Welch, Univ of North Carolina Ruigang Yang, Univ. of Kentucky  Invited Speakers To be Decided Important Dates Jul 19 Paper Submission deadline Aug 13 Acceptance notification Aug 20 Camera-ready deadline Sep 10  Position statements due  Submission Authors must submit papers with name and contact information via workshop website. Full papers should be 8 to 16 pages in length, while demonstration and short  papers should be 2 to 6 pages. All papers must follow standard ACM style guidelines and must be submitted in pdf format to gpingali@us.ibm.com. All workshop participants are strongly encouraged to submit position statements and points of debate prior to the workshop (by Sept 10). These statements will be posted on the workshop website, form the basis of a debate/discussion session, and be incorporated into a workshop report.
Workshop Scope Telepresence represents one of the most exciting and challenging areas of technology at the intersection of computing and communications. Researchers from various fields are addressing different aspects of telepresence technologies. However, most telepresence systems have been dealing with transmitting multimodal data rather than creating effective means of interacting with remote people and experiencing remote environments and events. Despite new developments in technology, the telephone continues to be the dominant medium for remote interaction and collaboration. While more sophisticated systems for distributed collaboration and immersive presence have emerged from time to time, their acceptance has been limited. The most commonly cited problems with such systems are that they are too difficult to setup and use, and that their value is not commensurate with cost. However, continued advances in multimodal sensing, multimodal display, networking, and semiconductor technologies suggest that there is rich potential for telepresence systems that dramatically transform how we communicate with people and experience remote environments and events. The challenge, then, is to develop effective telepresence systems that offer appropriate interfaces and tools to enable seamless interaction with remote people and events. This has been recognized as one of the “grand challenges” for the multimedia community. The design and measures of performance of such systems should be centred on end-user experience. The goal of this workshop is to foster a community of researchers advancing the various technical and socio-technical aspects of telepresence. We invite contributions from researchers in various fields addressing different aspects of this challenge. Submission We invite regular and position papers as well as demonstrations (accompanied by descriptive papers) on relevant topics, including: Modeling and design of telepresence systems Multimodal sensing (cameras, microphone arrays, haptic sensors, active badges etc.) Multimodal presentation (3D graphics, projection, 3D audio, force feedback etc.) Modeling and design of the telepresence experience Assimilation of data from different sources Formal models for interactivity and immersion (multimedia grammars, feedback) User interfaces for telepresence systems Adaptive, user-centric representation and presentation schemes Network design and infrastructure Immersive systems Multimodal systems for distributed collaboration Semiotics and mediated systems (transcoding of semantics across different sign systems, spatio-temporal databases for storing experience and context) User studies on telepresence Examples of telepresence system