Digital Workspace Concepts

Abstract

In our everyday lives we seek out meaning in the communication and interactions we have, with little thought as to how this works. Yet to a computer the act of natural language processing and `speaking' is a highly complex and difficult task. The subtle nuances of a facial expression, the tone of a human voice, the use of body language in the gesture of a hand or a touch is used to convey much direct and unspoken cultural information. Will machines ever have the empathy to understand and emotionalize these same features? Will machines have the cognitive ability to understand more than direct procedural instructions or to comprehend the ambiguity and intonation that often goes alongside natural language? These are perhaps goals of many cybernetic research projects today; it is a realistic frontier for the development of a union between the physical world and the technological world. This journey is a series of steps in the encoding of basic data into more sophisticated forms of transactions and then on to complex language and representations of the physical world in virtual environments. This journey has already begun, with the explosion in digital data from devices, sensors across the internet, and the myriad of software applications. Through images, emails, video, and web pages, we are describing our lives and the places we visit, live in, and work in.