It has become increasingly popular to study behavior with the help of video recordings, since only video recordings can show all aspects of the situation in which humans or animals interact with each other or with their environment. Using video creates many interesting methodological and technological problems that will be addressed during the conference. What kind of analog and digital recording techniques are applied to carry out these studies? How is the huge amount of video material maintained and archived? Recent technological developments make it possible to digitize and compress video information, i.e. to handle video information on computers and transfer it across computer networks. Digital technology offers completely new possibilities for the researcher, but creates also new types of problems. Which video encoding format should be used for archiving and for handling? How to handle the gigantic mass of information on servers and which media will offer efficient access in the future? Do we have to send media around such as CD and DVD or can we rely on access through the Internet? In the latter case one has to think about video streaming technologies, synchronization of various information streams and other aspects. New software packages support multimedia on computers and allow direct and efficient annotation. What kind of annotation schema will have to be used, how to store the annotations such that they can be exchanged with others, and how to find the material which you need for your scientific question at a certain moment? These and related problems will be addressed among others in the symposium on Measurement Methodologies in Gesture and Sign Language.

Measuring behavior requires a clear answer to the problem of defining behavioral items and patterns. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the building blocks (units) of behavior. The classical approach implies partitioning behavior right from the start into simultaneously performed (synchronous) behavior patterns. In contrast to this approach, it is also possible to use controlled kinematic variables (also called collective variables, order parameters, key variables, relevant variables) which may or may not assemble into relatively fixed synchronous behavior patterns. It will be evident that each of these approaches has its own consequences for the development of systems that track, monitor, and measure movement and/or behavior. For that reason, particular attention will be given to the problem of the units of behavior in the symposium on The Building Blocks of Behavior.

Measuring behavior has become a central issue in behavior genetics. In fact, it is the "post genome" challenge to tie the outcome of the genetic mapping to behavior. The limitations and possibilities will be addressed in the symposium on Behavioral Phenotyping of Rats and Mice.

Measuring and monitoring body postures and physical activity is considered to be a promising approach for prognosis and therapy evaluation. Today, there are various techniques that allow reliable measurements of head positions, limb movements, body postures and/or whole body motions. Data acquisition systems are becoming available for recording, extracting and analyzing body movement patterns that can be linked to other sets of variables. In fact, each of these techniques has its own prospects and perspectives. For that reason, a special symposium is devoted to Measuring Body Posture, Activity and Gait.

Measuring behavior of individuals moving amidst other individuals requires sophisticated, non-invasive tracking techniques. Today, there are new developments in this field that will be discussed in the symposium on Movement Tracking and Monitoring of Individuals and Groups.

Operant methodology is considered to be an important tool for studies on cognitive functions in behavioral pharmacology, psychology and neuroscience. Experience is primarily limited to pigeons, rats and humans, although this approach has recently also been applied to mice. Today, there are several attempts to design operant techniques that allow analysis of identical cognitive functions both in humans and animals. The symposium on Operant Conditioning Paradigms, Techniques and Tools deals with these and related aspects of operant methodology.

Measuring behavior also confronts us with the question to what extent humans can exert control about the type of codes to be used to describe human or animal behavior. Should one use an exhaustive coding approach or start with what is needed at that moment? Does modern technology effectively support incremental coding? Techniques for creating behavioral coding schemes have been historically developed to use paper and pencil methods or audio and video recording methods. The advent of inexpensive, compact computing power opens the possibility of developing coding schemes that take advantage of real-time data expansion. Current computerized recording systems have automated collection of time-sequential data, but do little if any real-time processing of data during the collection phase. We have entered an era where coding schemes need to take advantage of significant advances in computing power. For example, with sufficient real-time computing it is possible to design coding schemes that are extremely brief and compact which are expanded in real-time during data capture by table lookup schemes. Such "data expansion" coding schemes could allow the capture of real-time data that could exceed what can be captured with audio recording and require little or no post-capture processing. Furthermore, new pattern detection algorithms allow us to discover behavioral patterns that would otherwise remain hidden in an "ocean of data". These and related problems will be addressed in the symposium on Quantitative Analysis of Behavioral Observation Data.

Another aspect that is inherent to the use of technology deals with the consequences and possibilities of human-system interaction. To what extent does the present-day technology of data collection influence the operator's perception and understanding of a situation or a group and, accordingly, his decisions? In case of failures such as aircraft accidents, it appears that the human factor has the largest influence on system performance. Are there indeed conditions during which digital support tools that automate various processes worsen the task performance? To what extent do subjective impressions play a role? Is it possible to evaluate objectively subjective impressions like time-varying quality of compressed video and speech material? Today, there are also developments showing that the human-system interaction creates fully new possibilities. For instance, it has become possible to use brain waves for controlling a computer system. These topics will be addressed in the symposium on Human-System Interaction: Perception, Control and Situational Awareness.

Combining different techniques for acquiring and recording side-by-side various biobehavioral variables provides a multimodal experimental approach that should belong to the standard equipment of the ideal laboratory for animal and human behavior. Given the importance of this multimodal approach in the near future, two distinct symposia are devoted to this topic. An illustrative example is the multimodal approach that is becoming the standard in cognitive neuroscience. The electromagnetic techniques ( electro-encephalography: EEG; magneto-encephalography: MEG) provide high temporal resolution, but limited spatial resolution. In contrast, the hemodynamic methods ( Positron Emission Tomography: PET; functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: fMRI) provide relatively high spatial resolution, but limited temporal resolution. Ideally both types of measurement are combined within the same experiment. In the symposium on Measuring the Brain in Action, particular attention will be put on approaches that combine techniques with a high temporal resolution with techniques that have a high spatial resolution. Another typical example is the multimodal approach that is used to improve behavioral phenotyping by combining behavioral data with physiological parameters such as body temperature, heart rate, etc. The advantage of this approach will be addressed in the symposium on Integrated Measurement of Behavior and Physiology.

All these and related aspects are addressed at Measuring Behavior 2000. Currently new standards in the area of multimedia work are under discussion, new technologies are emerging, and new generations of software tools are being developed. We expect that the conference will help participants to understand the various approaches that are chosen in fundamental and applied sciences and will anticipate the technological and methodological trends.