The development of human and machine systems for conveying meaning has resulted in a range of new technologies: mobile phones, voice mail, SMS, avatars, personal assistants, voiceprint technology, auditory monitoring, and so on. Many of these are already available to the wider public; others are under development. But there are many significant conceptual and technological issues that need to be addressed for these technologies to fulfil their potential.

While we know that humans can and do adapt to complex environments filled with meaning and information in auditory and visual, spoken and written forms, the problem of understanding how humans negotiate these complexities has not been solved. High-level understanding of how humans selectively pick up just those skills and just that information which is important in any particular environment is still lacking. This lack is evident when the performance of artificial systems (for example, automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS) systems, and internet search engines) is considered in normal (noisy, unpredictable) environments. There is much to be gained from modelling advances here upon human systems, but first we need to know how these human systems operate.

HCSNet brings together researchers and their students through workshops, conferences, and a variety of collaboration schemes in order that existing research in speech, language, gesture and communication may be augmented by the juxtaposition and integration of diverse disciplines and approaches. By these means the aim of this network—better understanding and technological advances in human and machine systems for transmitting meaning and information—will be realised.