Making Sense of Ubiquitous Media style

In the emerging Post-PC era, more and more computers ´in the net´ can see, hear, or feel. Since these computers are networked, they can cooperate in the interpretation of their ´sensation´. Cameras, camcorders, etc. will soon be wirelessly connected, doubling as mobile phones. In other words: multimedia goes ubiquitous. On the other hand, users leverage off the wealth of text-based information present in the global Internet. However, the potential that lies in the ´cooperative sensation´ and in the use of global textual information is by far not leveraged: it is the past, present, and future grand challenge to enable computers to ´make more sense´ of all this information. The talk will provide a unified model for both multimedia sense-making and textual-information sense-making, and propose fostering the confluence of these two threads. Based on this unified view, it will suggest steps towards improved sense-making in the world of ubiquitous computers.