With the rapid development of Web-based learning and new concepts like virtual cla- rooms, virtual laboratories and virtual universities, many issues need to be addressed. On the technical side, there is a need for effective technology for deployment of W- based education.On the learning side, the cyber mode of learning is very different from classroom-based learning. How can instructional developmentcope with this new style of learning? On the management side, the establishment of the cyber university - poses very different requirements for the set-up. Does industry-university partnership provide a solution to addressing the technological and management issues? Why do we need to standardize e-learning and what can we do already? As with many other new developments, more research is needed to establish the concepts and best practice for Web-based learning. ICWL 2004, the 3rd International Conference on Web-Based Learning, was held at the Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) from August 8th to 11th, 2004, as a continued attempt to address many of the above-mentioned issues. Following the great successes of ICWL 2002 (Hong Kong) and ICWL 2003 (Australia), ICWL 2004 aimed at p- senting new progress in the technical, pedagogical, as well as management issues of Web-based learning. The conference featured a comprehensive program, including a tutorial session, a keynote talk, a main track for regular paper presentations, and an - dustrial track. We received 120 papers and accepted only 58 of them in the main track for both oral and poster presentations.

Multimodal Interfaces represents an emerging interdisciplinary research direction and has become one of the frontiers in Computer Science. Multimodal interfaces aim at efficient, convenient and natural interaction and communication between computers (in their broadest sense) and human users. They will ultimately enable users to interact with computers using their everyday skills. These proceedings include the papers accepted for presentation at the Third International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2000) held in Beijing, China on 1416 O ctober 2000. The papers were selected from 172 contributions submitted worldwide. Each paper was allocated for review to three members of the Program Committee, which consisted of more than 40 leading researchers in the field. Final decisions of 38 oral papers and 48 poster papers were made based on the reviewers' comments and the desire for a balance of topics. The decision to have a single track conference led to a competitive selection process and it is very likely that some good submissions are not included in this volume. The papers collected here cover a wide range of topics such as affective and perceptual computing, interfaces for wearable and mobile computing, gestures and sign languages, face and facial expression analysis, multilingual interfaces, virtual and augmented reality, speech and handwriting, multimodal integration and application systems. They represent some of the latest progress in multimodal interfaces research.