Smart u-Things - Challenging Real World Complexity
Jianhua Ma · 2005
The real physical things are called u-things if they are attached, embedded or blended with computers, networks, and/or some other devices such as sensors, actors, e-tags and so on. Smart u-things are ones that can sense, compute, communicate and take some responsive or automatic actions/reactions/proactions according to their goals, situated contexts, users’ needs, etc. After clarifying the basic features and three categories of smart u-things, i.e., smart object, smart space and smart system, the article is devoted to possible challenges in smart u-things’ research in terms of real world complexity. The challenges cover sufficiently and precisely detecting surrounding situations, anticipating users’ needs, finding the dynamic relations between things, building common knowledge to u-things, letting u-things self-aware, and making looped decisions for error corrections. These real world complexity oriented issues are more crucial and more challenging as compared with many other well realized technology challenges. Conjectures are of great importance since they suggest useful lines of research. - By A.M. Turing