There is general agreement that devices (including computers, robots, and other gadgets) and their interconnection will be increasingly more adaptive and--despite the overuse of the term--“intelligent.” Cognitive infocommunications looks at this scenario with the adjective “cognitive,” which is applied to almost everything: things, networks, capabilities, context spaces, and so on. “Cognitive” seems more malleable and diverse than intelligent, and the authors point out very soon that this has to be linked to some “cognitive capabilities.” However, their characterization and progress remain subjective.

It is no surprise then that the authors devote several chapters to clarifying what cognitive infocommunications is as a field and how it relates to other disciplines--especially those with the same first label, such as cognitive science, cognitive informatics, or cognitive computing.

This vindication of cognitive infocommunications as a discipline lasts well into chapter 4, with many figures placing cognitive infocommunications in the context of other areas. This raises the question of the authors’ intended readership. Do they want to convince other researchers or technocrats that cognitive infocommunications is a well-shaped, attractive area, or do they want to give a gentle introduction to the topic to students and academics in different areas and professionals from the ICT industry? My recollection is that the book serves the first purpose much better.

Several signs in this direction are the extensive use of acronyms and references to new, alternative names and disciplines, and the immersion in a soup of acronyms, jargon, and very abstract terms such as “emergence” and “synergies.” Several chapters look more like project proposals or white papers written in “technicalese,” rather than a progressive integration of tools answering scientific questions or solving a range of engineering problems.

In particular, chapter 1 describes how the field emerged, but does not clarify the problems it is meant to solve. The appearance of new phenomena is not a sufficient reason for a new discipline. The book should also anticipate--to an extent--what challenges and questions cognitive infocommunications will solve that other disciplines cannot. This and the two following chapters are at a very abstract, technocratic level, and would require more examples.

Part 2 still places cognitive infocommunications as synergic with other emergent disciplines. A useful overview of technologies in chapter 4 gives an idea of how different areas are becoming more and more related and changing in similar directions. Chapter 5 covers how other disciplines will be influenced and the distinction between icon-based, context-based, and pattern-based approaches and disciplines, which is cryptic but fortunately not key for the rest of the book. Chapter 6 is finally more specific, introducing some techniques; however, it’s unclear what new problems these techniques are meant to solve or even whether they should be central or peripheral for cognitive infocommunications, such as the notion of “mathability” developed in Section 6.6.

Part 3 is the meaty part of the book. Here one can get a more accurate idea of what the tools and techniques of cognitive infocommunications look like. This part is a new theory of (cognitive) communication, also embracing (multi-modal) perception, introducing definitions for “stream,” “icon,” “message,” “channel,” “modality,” “cue,” and “signal,” qualified by the prefix “CogInfoCom.” All these definitions and the surrounding material would allow the reader to sync with the CogInfoCom terminology and understand the community. Section 10.6 includes a relatively detailed example--more like this one would have been very helpful here and in other parts of the book, in the form of one or more running examples or themes.

Part 4 closes the book by looking into the future and getting us back to the meta-level of the first parts of the book. The “Future Internet” chapter looks like a white paper. It’s a series of strategic research areas, grouped into clusters, and many of them go beyond the particular cognitive infocommunications of “cluster 5,” which only reconnects with the so-called cognitive Internet ecosystems in the final chapter.

After completing the book, I felt that some of the most attractive ideas set forth in the preface were not fully developed. For instance, the idea that humans and devices co-evolve is key, such that human capabilities are changing as a consequence of ICT and vice versa, in a close loop that is becoming closer as humans and computers become more intertwined, the “human-ICT entanglement.” I would have liked to see this co-evolution covered to a greater extent.

Overall, this book puts the focus on several issues that clearly deserve attention at different levels. The major question is whether this book will go beyond the CogInfoCom conference to have a more widespread impact outside of the existing community.