The team has developed the DATA-VERSE project in the past two years. Though being digital natives, most people don’t quite understand how the cyber world works but perceive and appreciate its enticing manifestations of data changing, intertwining, and expanding. Therefore, the team sets out to create a container for these manifestations, through which it expects to find the specific perspective of its generation to interpret the status quo of the Internet. It will construct a virtual world whose data changes synchronically with those of the Internet based on the cyber environment of Taiwan. Also, by reviewing and studying the old and new data on the Internet, the team begins to take an intense interest in the developing history of the Internet. It wishes to demonstrate the life of the cyber world’s residents—namely the life of data, algorithms, viruses, and artificial intelligence, along with the developing histories of the Internet from their perspectives, hence the emergence of and preparation for the project.

Artificial intelligence will play a crucial role in the project. The strong power of artificial intelligence can be attributed to three main factors: outstanding algorithms and modeling techniques, incalculable data stored on the Internet as materials for artificial intelligence training, and substantial human resources for tasks of data labeling and organization, which respectively result from the continuous dedication of the experts and scholars in the 1950s, the large scale of the cyber domain, and the labor division systems relying on the Internet. Artificial intelligence is rooted in and born out of the Internet, and the tricky relationship between the two is right the highlight of this project. Furthermore, mature natural language processing technologies also allow conversations between humans and artificial intelligence, which then encourages the imagination: is it possible that our chat histories with artificial intelligence can be a specific kind of basic texts of oral history, like a record of an interview with a local elder which enables us to understand local history?