Introduction to the Workshop

As computing is becoming ubiquitous and network bandwidth grows, the way people teach, learn, and collaborate is rapidly changing. People are increasingly using computer technologies to make learning and collaboration easier, more convenient, and more effective. There are still many open technical problems that need to be addressed to make e-learning and collaboration a better experience. We need to address the problem of how to better capture and present a lecture or a group meeting. We need to better understand the meeting context such as the gesture, facial expressions, who is speaking, who wants to speak so that we can generate good indexing schemes to allow for nonlinear browsing and provide a better summarization of the meeting. How to make note-taking easier is another interesting problem. For a group meeting or a class with remote participants, we need to address the problem of how to present the meeting room to the remote participants and vice versa so that the remote participants are not left out. One clear advantage of a face-to-face meeting vs. current video conferencing is that many visual cues, such as eye contacts and who is paying attention to what, are lost in video conferencing. Most of these problems involve techniques from computer vision, graphics, and multimedia. The goal of this workshop is to bring together the researchers who are interested in this area to exchange their work and ideas.

We received 21 paper submissions. To ensure the quality of the workshop, each paper was assigned to 3 program committee members for review. Based on the review results, we selected 9 papers for presentation in the workshop. In addition to the paper presentations, the workshop has a panel session. We invited 6 world-known researchers as the panelists.

We would like to thank the program committee for their hard work in reviewing the submitted papers. We would like to thank both the ICCV'03 Beijing organizing committee and ICCV'03 France organizing committee. Many thanks go to Jim Rehg, Yi-Ping Hung,  Harry Shum, and Bill Triggs for their support and help with the workshop. We would like to thank John Krumm and Steven Shafer for their advices and helpful suggestions. We are grateful to Timothy Shih who has been extremely supportive to this workshop. Finally we would like to thank Mr. Yang-Fan Fang for making arrangements for this workshop at Yi-Chang city before ICCV'03 decided to move to France.

Zicheng Liu, Zhengyou Zhang, and Yong Rui

Workshop Co-Chairs