Semantic, Cognitive, and Perceptual Computing: Paradigms That Shape Human Experience

Unlike machine-centric computing, in which efficient data processing takes precedence over contextual tailoring, human-centric computation provides a personalized data interpretation that most users find highly relevant to their needs. The authors show how semantic, cognitive, and perceptual computing paradigms work together to produce actionable information.

The Vision of Personalized Computing

To enable the development of technologies that “disappear into the back-ground,”² human-centric computing research is tackling how to endow the Web with sophisticated, human-like capabilities to reduce information overload. The vision is to produce computers that can process and analyze data in a highly contextual and personalized manner at a scale much larger than the human brain can accommodate. Human-centric computing systems will be highly proactive in that they will sense, measure, monitor, predict, and react to the user's physical, cyber, and social realms and thus more intimately support any decision or action.⁷ Figure 1.

Views along the spectrum of machine-centric to human-centric computing. At the far right is our work on computing for human experience, which explores paradigms such as semantic, cognitive, and perceptual computing.