
Preface
Over the last 10–15 years it became obvious that all/most human–
human interactions, especially in the context of collaborative and
creative activities, necessarily involved several communication
senses, also referred to as ‘modes’ (hence the term ‘multimodal’).
Complementary, often asynchronous (not carrying the same seman-
tic information exactly at the same time), and interacting at different
hierarchical processing (granularity) levels, these very sophisticated
channels for communication and information exchanges include,
amongst others, spoken and written language understanding, visual
processing (face recognition, gestures and action recognition, ...