This paper analyses pointing gestures during low awareness situations occurring in a collaborative problem-solving activity implemented on an interactive tabletop interface. Awareness is considered as crucial requirement to support fluid and natural collaboration. We focus on pointing gestures as strategy to maintain awareness. We describe the results from a user study with five groups, each group consisting of three participants, who were asked to solve a task collaboratively on a tabletop interface. The ideal problem-solving solution would have been, if the three participants had been fully aware of what their personal area is depicting and had communicated this properly to the peers. However, often some participants are hesitant due to lack of awareness, some other want to take the lead work or expedite the process, and therefore pointing gestures to others’ personal areas arise. Our results from analyzing a multimodal corpus of 168.68 minutes showed that in 95% of the cases, one user pointed to the personal area of the other, while in a few cases (3%) a user not only pointed, but also performed a touch gesture on the personal area of another user. In our study, the mean for such pointing gestures in low awareness situations per minute and for all groups was M=1.96, SD=0.58.

Multilingualism is a cultural cornerstone of Europe and firmly anchored in the European treaties including full language equality. However, language barriers impacting business, cross-lingual and cross-cultural communication are still omnipresent. Language Technologies (LTs) are a powerful means to break down these barriers. While the last decade has seen various initiatives that created a multitude of approaches and technologies tailored to Europe’s specific needs, there is still an immense level of fragmentation. At the same time, AI has become an increasingly important concept in the European Information and Communication Technology area. For a few years now, AI – including many opportunities, synergies but also misconceptions – has been overshadowing every other topic. We present an overview of the European LT landscape, describing funding programmes, activities, actions and challenges in the different countries with regard to LT, including the current state of play in industry and the LT market. We present a brief overview of the main LT-related activities on the EU level in the last ten years and develop strategic guidance with regard to four key dimensions.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is the name for a European technology and innovation funding programme. AAL research field is about intelligent assistant systems for a healthier and safer life in the preferred living environments through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We focus specifically on speech and gesture interaction which can enhance the quality of lifestyle of people living in assistive environments, be they seniors or people with physical or cognitive disabilities. In this paper we describe our user study conducted in a lab at the University of Bremen in order to collect empirical speech and gesture data and later create and analyse a multimodal corpus. The user study is about a human user sitting in a wheelchair and performing certain inherently spatial tasks.