The Key Laboratory is established for exploring a major frontier of the future which is of great mutual interest between CUHK and MSRA: human-centric computing and interface technologies. These technologies embrace the information needs and natural communicative modalities of the human user at the center of human-computer interaction.

The Key Laboratory will conduct basis research and technology development in five strategic areas:

•     Computer Vision
•     Computer Graphics
•     Speech Processing and Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction
•     Multimedia Processing and Retrieval
•     Wireless Communications and Networking

These areas initially involve about 16 faculty members from all five engineering departments. The team will endow the computer with perceptual abilities to "see" the user, "hear" his speech and "sense" his touch and gestures. The computer can reciprocate by conveying information in personified forms like synthetic speech, facial expressions and avatar gestures. The computer can also enable instant browsing and retrieval of multilingual information repositories in text as well as multimedia; and the visualization of complex information via a multitude of audio-visual presentations, which will be useful for high end applications such as virtual anatomy. Wireless networking with broadband can further extend computer accessibility to a wider diversity of users and to permeate our everyday lives.