The MUHCI  project was lauched  on September 1st, 2000. It is a Fifth Framework project funded by the EU to a value of 1.5 M Euros for three years. The project involves eight prestigious institutions around Europe as indicated in this webpage. 

MUHCI focuses on human-centered interfaces. Our approach is to develop a human-like computer that can understand the behavior of human beings, can express its emotions to us, and can communicate and interact with us in natural ways. In the project, a number of challenging, closely coupled, analysis tasks are identified, namely, (a) robustifying face analysis (face localisation, facial feature extraction, facial feature tracking); (b) face verification; (c) facial expression and face gesture recognition;  (d) hand gesture recognition; (e) automatic interpretation of user’s behavior from cursor  movements; (f) audio-visual speech recognition; (g) audio-visual speech synthesis; (h) improving 3-D face modeling;  (i) facial animation providing higher quality of emotions. The aforementioned analysis tasks correspond to the "sensors + brain" parts. Synthesis tasks, such as the development   of talking heads and active browsers, are addressed, that correspond to the "brain + actuators" part. Other applications, closely related to the above defined tasks, are also promoted, i.e., (a) developing, extending and improving several techniques for building databases of faces and bodies (cloning from photographs, morphing, generating populations, manual editing), and publishing facial animation content on the Internet; (b) model-based natural-synthetic coding.