CITA 2011 - 2011 7th International Conference on IT in Asia (CITA)

In today's world we see a convergence of a variety of dimensions of technologies, standards, protocols and architectures leading to the emergence of advanced tools, techniques and platforms that are poised to transform the world that we live in. Beyond the convergence of media, protocols, platforms, transmissions forms, etc., we are now moving into a world of singularity of forms and structure. The prospects of the intensifying convergences across all dimensions in as many ways and forms will require the re-engineering of all aspects of our lives. Imagine a world where every entity speaking the same language with a means of connecting to anything and everything on a singular common platform.

Emerging convergences include the following; software embedding into all sorts of appliances, devices and hardware, the overlap between real and virtual worlds, the ubiquitous networks and infrastructure providing pervasive access and control, multi-modal integration for knowledge discovery, connected meaning-aware Web of things and singular advanced informatics applied across a variety of fields.

One should also not overlook the social implications of the convergence and converging technologies. Issues of concerns include privacy, widespread data mining, knowledge gaps and divides. There are many lessons that we could learn from nature to shape the future directions. A question that we may want to pose is, is there not a simpler way of doings things by harnessing the singularity of forms.