Physical-Cyber-Social Computing: An Early 21st Century Approach

Technology plays an increasingly important role in facilitating and improving personal and social activities, engagements, decision making, interaction with physical and social worlds, insight generation, and just about anything that humans, as intelligent beings, seek to do. The term computing for human experience (CHE) captures technology's human-centric role, emphasizing the unobtrusive, supportive, and assistive part technology plays in improving human experience. Here, the authors present an emerging paradigm called physical-cyber-social (PCS) computing, supporting the CHE vision, which encompasses a holistic treatment of data, information, and knowledge from the PCS worlds to integrate, correlate, interpret, and provide contextually relevant abstractions to humans. They also outline the types of computational operators that make up PCS computing.