International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces for Skills Transfer.

Abstract

This volume collects the work presented at the 1st international Conference on Multimodal interfaces for Skills Transfer (SKILLS09), held in Bilbao (Spain) on 15th -16th December, 2009, and promoted by the European SKILLS Integrated Project. SKILLS09 is a major forum for researchers in the field of Multimodal Interfaces for human Skills transfer. Training on human skills is state-of-the-art research on Human-Machine-Interfaces (HMI) and Psychology. There are many manual skills and activities where human learners find the symbolic and iconic information difficult to remap into movement patterns. Something that is represented in an objective space must be translated into the subjective space of the body, where many actions are automatic and not consciously controlled. Enactive representations of the task seek to bridge this gap. Enactive knowledge is not simply multisensory mediated knowledge, but knowledge stored in the form of motor responses and acquired by the act of “doing”. A typical example of enactive knowledge is constituted by the competence required for tasks such as driving a car, playing a musical instrument, modelling objects from clay, performing sports, etc., which would be difficult to describe in an iconic or symbolic form. This type of knowledge transmission can be considered the most direct, in natural and intuitive terms, since it is based on the experience and on the perceptual responses to motor acts. This conference presents and discusses recent developments in the application of the concept of Enaction for the transfer of manual human skills, that is, “Enaction on Skills”. Thus, the presented papers cover topics related to skills conceptualization and transfer process, from expert’s skills capturing to skill rendering and assessment, without forgetting the required technologies that enable this process. Finally, we want to thank everyone that made possible this conference: authors, LABEIN, CEIT, SKILLS consortium, European Union, Basque Government and all committee members for the high quality of work they have done.