The 1st Workshop on
Child, Computer and Interaction
(ICMI'08 post-conference workshop)
Chania, Crete, Greece, October 23, 2008
An event supported by


Proceedings CD-ROM


Welcome to WOCCI 2008


Dear Colleagues and Friends,

Welcome to the Workshop on Child, Computer and Interaction 2008, held in combination with the Tenth International
Conference on Multimodal Interfaces in Crete, Greece. This Workshop is dedicated to bringing together researchers
and practitioners from university and industry working on all aspects of multimodal child-machine interaction. Children
present quite a challenge for researchers when compared to adults. The Workshop provides a unique opportunity for
bringing together different research communities, to demonstrate various state-of-the-art components that can make
up the next generation of child centred computer interaction. Technological advances are increasingly necessary in a
world where education and health pose growing challenges to the core well-being of our societies. Noticeable examples
are remedial treatments for children with or without disabilities, and first and second language learning in understaffed
environments.

With 20 papers accepted from all around the world, the Workshop can be considered a success. The submissions to the
Workshop reflect recent advances in several core technologies for multi-modal child-machine interaction, integrated
into experimental design, system prototypes as well as evaluation tools. Most papers address issues related to speech
interaction with particular emphasis on speech assessment and language tutoring. The presented work also provides
tools for future integration, such as the first synthetic child's voice, and methods of analysis of speech and discourse
patterns. In this field the acquisition of both corpora and their labeling is very important and is addressed by
several papers.

The Workshop starts with the invited talk by Dr. Georgios N. Yannakakis who will present his work about modeling
and optimizing user satisfaction in interactive entertainment. He will address key questions about which features of an
interactive-entertainment system (e.g. screen-based computer or augmented-reality game) contribute to the player's
enjoyment and how one can automatically generate interesting and satisfying experiences for a given system and a
specific user. This introduction is followed by the morning oral session, with 7 presentations, and two poster
sessions in the afternoon, with 13 presentations. The Workshop ends with a brainstorming session about the next
steps to achieve state-of-the-art multi-modal child-computer interaction over the years to come.

This year, topics related to speech interaction dominated and we hope that next year we will receive more submissions
on different modes of interaction as well as an increased representation from related fields for growing multidisciplinary
approach. With this excellent technical program and a beautiful venue, we believe that WOCCI 2008 will be a successful
event.

Thank you for attending this Workshop and we look forward to a successful series of future WOCCI's.

The Program Chairs,
KAY BERKLING
Polytechnic Univ. of Puerto Rico
San Juan, Puerto Rico 00919 USA 		DIEGO GIULIANI
Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Trento, Italy 		ALEX POTAMIANOS
Technical University of Crete
Crete, Greece