Ever since it was founded, Saarland University has viewed its location on the German-French border as one of its distinguishing characteristics. Students can, for instance, acquire the Europaicum – a certificate, unique in Germany, that demonstrates special interest and expertise in European affairs. Students of all subjects can also spend part of their degree programme studying at one of our international partner universities in order to gain a double-degree. The variety of subjects and courses offered enables students to plan their university studies effectively to meet their specific academic and career requirements. The strengths of Saarland University are informatics, nanotechnology, biosciences and Europe are the key disciplines that are shaping the university’s profile. The outstanding reputation of the Department of Informatics was underscored in the national academic excellence initiative and the numerous externally funded research projects across all fields of academic study emphasize the quality of the academic work being carried out at Saarland University. The Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction (MMCI) was established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative in November 2007. The cluster comprises the Computer Science and Computational Linguistics and Phonetics departments of Saarland University, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, and the newly established Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. An integral goal of our cluster is the promotion of young researchers, and as such, we have committed the majority of our allocated funds to the establishment of several independent research groups.