Announcing Blue Sky Paper Awards *************************************** ACM ICMI 2021: Announcing Blue Sky Paper Awards https://icmi.acm.org/2021/index.php?id=award 18-22 Oct 2021, Montreal, Canada *************************************** Announcing New ACM ICMI 2021 Blue Sky Paper Awards The Blue Sky Paper Awards have been announced. Congratulations to awardees! The papers will be presented at ICMI 2021, in the Blue Sky Papers session moderated by Prof. Sharon Oviatt. The tentative conference program is available at https://icmi.acm.org/2021/index.php?id=program First Place: Sandy Pentland Optimized Human-A.I. Group Decision Making: A Personal View Second Place: Georgios Rizos Towards Sonification in Multimodal and User-Friendly Explainable Artificial Intelligence Third Place: Philippe Palanque Dependability and Safety: Two Clouds in the Blue Sky of Multimodal Interaction The Blue Sky paper track at ACM ICMI 2021 emphasizes innovative, visionary, and highimpact contributions. This track solicited papers relevant to ICMI content that go beyond the usual research paper to present new visions that stimulate the community to pursue innovative new research directions. The papers were encouraged to present high-risk controversial ideas that may challenge existing assumptions and methodologies, or propose new applications or theories. Submitted papers were expected to represent deep reflection, to argue rigorously, and to present ideas from a high-level synthetic viewpoint (e.g., multidisciplinary, based on multiple methodologies). The 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2021) will be held in Montreal, Canada October 18-22, 2021. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human and human-computer interaction, interfaces, and system development. The main conference themes in 2021 will be behavioral health and virtual connectivity, but other major topics of central interest include human communication and multimodal language/dialogue processing, human-robot/agent interaction, affective computing and social interaction, cognitive modeling, multimodal representations and fusion-based architectures, machine learning for multimodal interaction and system applications, speech, gesture, haptics, olfaction, gaze and vision, multimodal datasets and platforms, mobile and ubiquitous interfaces, interfaces for virtual/augmented reality, smart environments, and assistive technologies. <div style="font-family:Arial;white-space:nowrap;"> </div> <hr class="signature-separator" align="left" style="margin:0.5em 0;width:10em;height:1px;background-color:#999;border:none;"> <div> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- </div> Dongmei Jiang Professor, School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University <div> Xi'an China. </div> <div> Tel: +86-29-88431532 </div> <div> Email: jiangdm@nwpu.edu.cn </div> <div> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- </div>