Semantic, Cognitive, and Perceptual Computing: Advances toward Computing for Human Experience

While the debate about whether AI, robots, or machines will replace humans is raging (among Gates, Hawking, Musk, Thiel, and others), there remains a long tradition of viewpoints that take a progressively more human-centric view of computing. A range of viewpoints from machine-centric to human-centric computing have been put forward by McCarthy (intelligent machines) [JM07], Weiser (ubiquitous computing) [MW91], Engelbart (augmenting human intellect) [DE62], Licklider (man-machine symbiosis) [JCRL60], and others as shown in Figure 1. In this paper, we focus on the recent progress taking place in the tradition of human-centric computing, such as Computing for Human Experience (CHE) (Sheth) [S10] and Experiential Computing (Jain) [RJ03]. CHE focuses on serving our needs, empowering us while keeping us in the loop, making us more productive with better and timelier decision-making, and improving and enriching our quality of life. Experiential Computing proposes to utilize the symbiotic relationship between computers and people and exploit their relative strengths, of symbolic/logic manipulation and complex pattern recognition respectively.