Friday, September 21, 2007

Merging 'Physicality' and 'Virtuality'...

Needless to say, the primary aspect that distinguishes human beings from other living creatures on the planet is their ability to communicate in a manner which cultures semantic sense. Today's research direction in Computer Science is moving more and more towards identifying means to make our lives more conducive to our ambiance: merging 'physicality' and 'virtuality'. Nevertheless, while theory has its own beauty in itself, developing another algorithm which can solve the Travelling Salesman problem in polynomial time with an accepted error bound is not going to answer the question raised by the design of a conducive human environment. While this suggests, human beings are central to the next generation research, it is imperative to inculcate in the research the complexity of the manner in which we decipher semantics around us.
For the sake of generality in the systems perspective, let us consider the 'human machine' to be a flip-flop black box with standard input and output: we receive and collect information from the outside world via our five senses, perceive them in some manner under a personalized context, and then output them via some media in the form of an action. And the inherent media for us to interact with the outside world is communication, precisely the semantics we decipher. Such interaction via some media is always accompanied by a observable action. Consider this example. The blog I am writing today to communicate my thoughts: writing a blog post is an action here. However, beyond media and action, we encounter further hidden observables. This blog makes me mirthful and I reflect that in my email to my Mom. We accrue sentiments.
There are several dimensions to address for a unified framework that attempts to generate a conducive environment to human beings amidst the physical world and the virtualism of computers. Media, action and associated sentiments are just one of the facets. A more comprehensive analysis of deciphering the complex human semantics is what conjures up the next step of technical and research challenge.

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