Smart u-Things and Ubiquitous Intelligence

Abstract

Smart u-things are real things with attached, embedded or blended computers, networks, and/or some other devices such as sensors, actors, e-tags and so on, and they can sense, compute, communicate and take some adaptive actions/reactions/proactions according to their goals, situated contexts, users’ needs, etc. It is envisioned that smart u-thing will be everywhere eventually towards ubiquitous intelligence and smart world. One of the profound implications of such ubiquitous smart u-things is that various kinds and levels of intelligence will exist pervasively in real everyday objects, environments, systems and even ourselves, and possibly be extended from man-made to natural things. The ubicomp/percomp can be regarded, in a sense, as the computing of all these smart/intelligent u-things, which are the basic elements and components of the smart world. After clarifying the essential features and three categories of smart u-things, i.e., smart object, smart space and smart system, the talk is devoted to discuss possible challenges in smart u-things’ research in terms of real world complexity. The main intentions are to examine the possible hard issues to suggest some potential research lines; and to let researchers in this field coolhead and being aware of the hardness of these challenges in making real things truly smart.