Smartphones and other wearable computers have become an integral part of most people's life. They support us in a wide variety of applications and use cases from simple navigation over health to work. Most of the time these devices just externalize knowledge, be it ours (over notes, pictures, calendar information, etc.) or that of others (e.g. access to Wikipedia, maps, Internet applications). Yet, even though we have all of this information at our fingertips, it is unclear how we should interface with it. How can we make information intake more "natural"? Can we extend our perception to understand complex digital data more intuitively? New findings in neuroscience, applied psychology, and physiology suggest it’s possible. This Dagstuhl Seminar brings together specialists of these fields, as well as researchers from wearable computing, human-computer interaction, machine perception, and pattern recognition to discuss the possibility of digitally enhancing our cognition/perception, augment our skills and create novel digital senses.

The concept to use information technology to augment the human intellect goes back to research from the 1960s (Douglas Engelbart et al.). The basic idea is to extend the computational (and other) capabilities of the human mind using technology. The ongoing technical progress in key areas (better insights how our mind works, advances in real-life tracking of physical, cognitive and emotional states) will enable fundamentally new approaches to amplify the human intelligence.

A major objective of the Dagstuhl Seminar is to foster research and explore and model new means for increasing human intake of information in order to lay the foundation for augmented cognition. One important characteristic of the human mind is that it has significant fluctuations in productivity and capacity. Our mind has ebb and flow, and is affected by various factors, some of which we do not even realize. These fluctuations manifest in patterns in human behavior and physiological signals. We aim to discuss technologies that can give us more insights into the ebb and flow of the human mind as a basis for cognitive augmentation. Beside just recognizing cognitive fluctuations, an elegant solution to extend people’s sensed information through technology would be to augment or "code" cognition.

This seminar focuses on how to interact with information from the digital domain in a minimally disruptive way, creating novel sensory experiences using and extending human perception and cognition.

Creative Commons BY 4.0

Kai Kunze, Pattie Maes, Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, and Katrin Wolf