This collection of original contributions reports on key advances in intelligent (knowledge-based) user interfaces that exploit multiple media - text, graphics, maps - and multiple modalities - visual, auditory, gestural - to facilitate human-computer interaction. Chapters are grouped into three sections that address automated presentation design, intelligent multimedia interfaces, and architectural and theoretical issues.
Although humans have a natural facility for managing and exploiting multiple input and output media, computers do not. Consequently, providing machines with the ability to interpret multimedia input and generate multimedia output would be a valuable facility for a number of key applications such as information retrieval and analysis, training and decision support. Successful intelligent multimedia interfaces require theories and technologies from a host of disciplines, including computational linguistics, computer graphics, cognitive science, human computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work - all of them represented in this collection.