IEEE Future Directions
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In the IEEE Digital Reality Initiative -DRI- we have spearheaded the concept of Cognitive Digital Twins -CDTs. Note that Cognitive Digital Twins have been around for a few years now, probably their first “mentioning” can be attributed to IBM (2018). What singles out the contribution of DRI is the use of CDTs to represent human and enterprise knowledge. In the case of IBM, as well as in several other declinations of CDTs the focus is on the cognition capability of a machine (usually associated to a robot and its AI).
Next week, on September 14th, I am going to discuss the potential of CDT in the context of human resources management. It will be a discussion, promoted by ESTE and HR Coffee, starting from the use of people analytics and extending them to create CDTs. You may join freely but you need to register first (it will be in Italian but you can always get a real time translation).
Both companies and individuals have a value in their knowledge (includes expertise -explicit, like knowing to read a music sheet, and implicit, like knowing how to play the piano; for a company an example of implicit knowledge is the company culture). Hence both have an interest in managing their knowledge. So far we have seen very little in terms of automation support but in the future I bet that technologies like CDTs will become essential. More than that. The very step of starting to leverage on Peoples Analytics to create CDTs is forcing a company, and an individual, to reason on what knowledge is relevant and for what, in other words transform a static description of knowledge (like the one you find in employees records in Excel files) into an executable, operational knowledge. I will post in the coming days more thoughts on CDTs in the area of knowledge resource management.
One important aspect, that we won’t have time to discuss in that September 14th event, is the implication of creating and using CDTs from an ethical and social point of view. That will be the focus of the DRI webinar on September 29th. Plan to join (register here) if you are interested in discovering what happens when you open up a can of worms 😉  ….
An important aspect of CDT is that where Digital Twins act as a bridge between the physical (device) space and the digital space, the CDT acts as a bridge between the “human” intelligence and the “artificial” intelligence and is a crucial component to achieve a flanking of AI rather than a substitution of humans by AI. This will be briefly addressed in the September 14th event and expanded in the September 29th webinar.
