Advanced Multimodal Frameworks to Support Human-Computer Interaction on Social Computing Environments

In recent years, the growing improvements of the computational capability of the mobile and desktop devices, jointly to the potentialities of the current fast network connections have allowed the wide spread of advanced and complex applications and services belonging to the social computing area. The more current approaches used to interact with this kind of applications and services (hereinafter called social computing environments) do not seem able to provide an effective and exhaustive support to the human-computer interaction process. For this reason, in order to overcome this kind of problems, it is necessary to turn to more suitable interaction methodologies. In this context, human-oriented interfaces can be profitably used to support every kind of social computing environment. More specifically, multimodal interfaces enable users an effortless and powerful communication way to represent concepts and commands on different mobile and desktop devices. This chapter explores the more suitable possibilities to employ multimodal frameworks (and related algorithmic approaches) in order to interact with different kinds of social computing environments.