The proper role of technology to improve human experience has been discussed by visionaries and scientists from the early days of computing and electronic communication. Technology now plays an increasingly important role in facilitating and improving personal and social activities and engagements, decision making, interaction with physical and social worlds, generating insights, and just about anything that an intelligent human seeks to do. I have used the term Computing for Human Experience (CHE) [1] to capture this essential role of technology in a human centric vision. CHE emphasizes the unobtrusive, supportive and assistive role of technology in improving human experience, so that technology “takes into account the human world and allows computers themselves to disappear in the background” (Mark Weiser [2]).

In this talk, I will portray physical-cyber-social (PCS) computing that takes ideas from, and goes significantly beyond, the current progress in cyber-physical systems, socio-technical systems and cyber-social systems to support CHE [3]. I will exemplify future PCS application scenarios in healthcare and traffic management that are supported by (a) a deeper and richer semantic interdependence and interplay between sensors and devices at physical layers, (b) rich technology mediated social interactions, and (c) the gathering and application of collective intelligence characterized by massive and contextually relevant background knowledge and advanced reasoning in order to bridge machine and human perceptions. I will share an example of PCS computing using semantic perception [4], which converts low-level, heterogeneous, multimodal and contextually relevant data into high-level abstractions that can provide insights and assist humans in making complex decisions. The key proposition is to explain that PCS computing will need to move away from traditional data processing to multi-tier computation along data-information-knowledge-wisdom dimension that supports reasoning to convert data into abstractions that humans are adept at using.

Keywords: Computing for Human Experience, Machine-Human-Social-Semantic Perception, Semantic Abstraction, Physical-Cyber-Social Systems, Physical-Cyber-Social Computing

[1] A. Sheth, Computing for Human Experience
[2] M. Weiser, The Computer for 21st Century
[3] A. Sheth, Semantics empowered Cyber-Physical-Social Systems
[4] C. Henson, A. Sheth, K. Thirunarayan, Semantic Perception: Converting Sensory Observations to Abstractions