Human-Centric Computing

With the world around us rapidly becoming smarter, an extremely relevant question is how “we humans” are going to cope with the onslaught of information coming at us. One plausible answer is to use similar technologies to evolve ourselves and to equip us with the necessary tools to interact with and to become an essential part of the smart world. Various wearable devices have been or are being developed for this purpose. However, their potential to create a whole new set of human experiences is still largely unexplored. To be more effective, functionality cannot be centralized and needs to be distributed to capture the right information at the right place. This requires a human Intranet, a platform that allows multiple distributed input-output and information processing functions to coalesce and form a single application. In addition, it needs the capabilities to understand, interpret, reason, and act on the obtained data under diverse and changing conditions, and to do so in concert with the human body and its computer, the brain. To this effect, this article explores the concept of human-centric computing, an approach that aspires to create a symbiotic convergence between biological and physical computing.