The multilingual European Information Society is quickly getting shape. To have user-friendly access to information, systems are needed that integrate a wide variety of human communication modalities. The development of these systems requires researchers and engineers with backgrounds in speech, language, vision, artificial intelligence, computer science, etc. ELSNET, the European Network in Language and Speech, brings together more than one hundred top academic and industrial research teams, covering nearly all-European countries. ELSNET's long-term technological goal is to strengthen Europe's position in the whole area of human language technologies.