The Commission of the European Union, through its Fourth Framework R&D programme is committed to the development of the Information Society. There is no doubt that there will be many radical changes in all aspects of society caused by the far-reaching impact of continuing advances in information and communi cation technologies. Many of these changes cannot be predicted, but that uncer tainty must not stop us from moving forward. The challenge is to ensure that these technologies are put to use in the most beneficial manner, taking fully into account the rich cultural and linguistic backgrounds within the peoples of Europe. We have a duty to ensure that the ultimate end-users of the technology are involved in the development and application of that technology to help shape its use. Without this active involvement, designers will not understand the individual and organisational requirements of the users, and the users will not understand the impact and applicability of the new technology. Failure on either account will lead to a sense of resentment on the part of the users and a lost opportunity to improve the quality of human life. The work, sponsored by the Human Comfort & Security sub-domain of the ESPRIT programme, has a central part to play in the creation of the Information Society, lying as it does at the interface between the technology and the user."

"User is king" is not a new concept, but it is certainly one that has gathered considerable momentum in the recent years. The driving force are the increasing and relentless pace of competition and the consequent attempts by many companies to keep and improve their marketshare. Since the beginning of ESPRIT Programme in 1984, the Human Computer Interface has been the subject of attention, in terms of technology development and utilisation of those technologies in various applications in the fields of Information Processing Systems, Computer Integrated Manufacturing, and Office and Business Systems. This topic area had been addressed in a number of different perspectives: user modelling, task analysis, cognitive aspects of interaction and assimilation of information, natural language speech and graphics, processing of multisensor information and its presentation, and a wide range of applications in which these technologies are used. In addition to the previous ESPRIT programmes, the specific programme for Information Technology of the European Framework Programme for 1994-1999 has recognised the ever increasing importance of "ease of use" in computer applications. The work programme on Human Comfort and Security is an attempt to address these issues. Its primary objectives are the exploitation of existing knowledge and expertise in usability engineering by integrating methods and tools into coherent toolsets, the generation of improved human computer interface components, demonstrating their application in practice, and widely disseminating the results and promoting the take-up of these technologies.

Traditionally, the European-based biannual international conference "EUROSPEECH" dealing with all aspects of speech science and technology is preceded by an "ESPRIT Speech Projects Days," which presents a particularly well timed opportunity to measure progress in speech technology and ap plications in Europe. The last venue was held in Berlin, Germany, on September 20th, 1993. The success of this workshop encouraged the major European experts in the field to contribute to this volume. Published in the ESPRIT Research Report series, it presents the results of advanced European research on speech technologies and its applications in the multilingual framework of the European Union. Speech is an important factor in building an integrated European communication platform. Strong links exist between speech and natural language processing, and human computer interaction. Recent experimental results on multilingual conversion between both speech and text show the advantage of integrating phonetic, lexical, and syntactic knowledge, and also demonstrate the feasibility of multilingual voice systems in the human-computer interface applications. Multilingual queries use natural language-based co-operative dialogue as an interface to the computer services in the information applications. Continuous and robust speech understanding is here addressed for both speaker-independent and speaker-adaptive processing, together with dialogue modelling and manage ment. Such technologies are then used in the design of computer workstations with a speech-based human interface for a large range variety of information technology applications (e.g. in the office, telecommunications, and computer aided education)."