FAU Erlangen participates in WP4 on Signals and Signs, and in WP5 on Databases. In the first year, activities concentrated on a kick-off meeting, a summer school on databases, and workshops on theory, signals and signs, and databases. Deliverables were due at the end of 2004 describing in detail so called exemplars, i.e., pieces of work in each of the areas which exemplify how a key problem in the area can be solved in a principled way; and which also demonstrates how work focused on that area can integrate with work focused on the other areas. The exact form of an exemplar is not prespecified: it may be a working system, but it might also be a well-developed design, or a representational system, or a method for user-centred design. As exemplar, our institute initiated a so called forced co-operation initiative called CEICES (Combining Efforts for Improving automatic Classification of Emotional user States): we provide an annotated emotional database (i.e. speech files, phonetic lexicon, manually corrected word segmentation, emotional labels, manually corrected fundamental frequency values, syntactic-prosodic boundary labels) and a definition of train and test samples. All participating HUMAINE partners share extracted feature values; the common goal is improved recognition rates and a repertoire of most relevant features.