Given the progress in the field of the Information Technology we can only rejoice and make use of everything that brings our Humanity to even higher levels of Development. The past four decades have brought dramatic changes in the way we live and work. This phenomenon is widely characterized as the advent of the Information Society. 

About twenty years ago, most digital content was textual. Today, it has expanded to include audio, video, and graphical data. The challenge is now to organize, understand, and search this multimodal information in a robust, efficient, and intelligent way, and to create dependable systems that allow natural and intuitive multimodal interaction. 

The Excellence Cluster on “Multimodal Computing and Interaction”, established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative, addresses this challenge. The term multimodal describes the different kinds of information such as text, speech, images, video, graphics, and high-dimensional data, and the way it is perceived and communicated, particularly through vision, hearing, and human expression. The cluster comprises the Computer Science and Computational Linguistics and Phonetics departments of Saarland University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, and the newly established Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. 

To provide Excellence, Immediacy, and Efficiency we combine modern technology and human facilities.