Cyber-I: Vision of the Individual's Counterpart on Cyberspace

Cyber-Individual, with a short term 'Cyber-I', is a real individual's counterpart in cyberspace. It is closely related to human-centric computing ideology which focuses on placing human in the center of computing. The study on Cyber-I tries to re-examine and analyze human essence in the digital era. Cyber-I's vision is to create a unique, digital, comprehensive description for every real person being in the cyberspace. Human's social context, mood, temper, physical status and so on also need to be considered for such a full description. Further research on social computing, antropology, human behaviour study, psycology and other fields/disciplines are required to enrich Cyber-I concept, meanwhile, Cyber-I will also raise new problems to these fields/disciplines. The IT technologies on the whole including ubiquitous computing, pervasive sensors, wired/wireless networks and clouds will bring Cyber-I vision into practice. In this paper, we first present the Cyber-I concept, its important characteristics and basic architecture. Then, we discuss the special features of Cyber-I as compared with other related concepts and studies including AR (augmented reality), HCI (human computer interaction), AI, artificial life, etc. The Cyber-I layered architecture and basic elements are described in detail, and the associations between Cyber-I and the corresponding real individual are explained as well. Finally, fundamental problems and challenging issues brought by Cyber-I are addressed in terms of necessary technique, security, privacy, ethic, philosophy, etc.