SPECIAL SECTION ON BIG DATA SERVICES AND COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

FOR INDUSTRIAL SYSTEMS

Received October 10, 2015, accepted October 20, 2015, date of publication October 26, 2015, date of current version October 29, 2015.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2015.2493890

From Internet to Smart World

HUANSHENG NING1 , (Senior Member, IEEE), HONG LIU2 , (Member, IEEE),
JIANHUA MA3 , (Member, IEEE), LAURENCE T. YANG4,5 , (Senior Member, IEEE),
YUELIANG WAN2 , XIAOZHEN YE1 , RUNHE HUANG3 , (Member, IEEE)
1 School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China
2 Research Institute, Run Technologies Company, Ltd., Beijing 100192, China
3 Facultyof Computer and Information Sciences, Hosei University, Tokyo 102-8160, Japan
4 School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
5 Department of Computer Science, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS B2G 2W5, Canada

Corresponding author: H. Ning ([email protected])

This work was supported in part by the Science and Technology Foundation of Beijing under Grant Z141100002714003, in part by the
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant 06105031, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China under Grant 61471035, and in part by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research under
Grant 25330270 and Grant 26330350.

ABSTRACT The development of informationization and intelligentization prompts Internet developing

toward a new era. A deep fusion among cyber space, physical space, social space, and thinking space
brings a quaternionic cyber-physical-social-thinking hyperspace, based on which an embryo of smart world
is being established through heterogeneous spaces. The smart world is expected to be an attractive perspective
involving ubiquitous sensing, computing, and communication to achieve comprehensive interconnections of
physical perception, cyber interaction, social correlation, and cognitive thinking. In this paper, evolution
of the smart world is briefly introduced, and physical-based coordination, social-inspired interactivity,
brain-abstracted cooperativity, and cyber-enabled homogeneity are, respectively, discussed as the main
characteristics of the smart world.

INDEX TERMS Smart world, Internet of Things, cyber-physical-social system, hyperspace.

I. INTRODUCTION to address cyber entities’ interconnections in the cyber

The development of informationization and intelligentization space. Considering wireless networking and mobile
has brought a global digital revolution in recent decades, communications being involved into the Internet, physical
several research areas (e.g., Internet of Things (IoT), social objects establish interactions with the cyber entities via
computing, and brain informatics) emerge to launch signi- standard communication protocols. Accordingly, cyber-
ficative influences for academia and industry. The IoT as physical system appears as an integration of ubiquitous
a representative system paradigm aims to realize interac- processing, networking, and computing, and realizes that the
tions among ubiquitous things through heterogeneous spaces, physical objects are mapped into the cyber space as the cyber
and is characterized by comprehensive sensing, reliable entities for more convenient interactions. Thereafter,
transmission, and intelligent processing to achieve pervasive social attributes (e.g., ownerships, and affiliation rela-
interconnections, intelligence, and efficiency [1], [2]. Social tionships) are highlighted to address the human oriented
computing highlights socialized intelligence by capturing interconnections to establish the cyber-physical-social
social dynamics, appointing social agents, and managing system.
social knowledge to develop beyond personal computing, If social attributes are regarded as a person’s exter-
facilitating collaboration and social interactions. Brain nal elements, thinking related issues (e.g., emotion, self-
informatics is based on web intelligence centric informa- awareness, and subconsciousness) will be a person’s internal
tion technologies to enhance human brain data, information, elements. Considering a person’s both external and inter-
and knowledge interactions. It brings an inevitable recon- nal elements, the cyber-physical-social space is required
figurable combination of emerging technologies to prompt to evolve towards a wiser ecosystem with thinking partic-
Internet developing into a new era, called smart world, ipation. Human cognitive capacities (e.g. logic reasoning,
in which the ubiquitous things establish dynamical and seam- and attention distribution) and society principles are
less interconnections in the cyber-physical-social-thinking involved for designing a harmonious ecosystem [4],
hyperspace [3]. and cyber-physical-social-thinking (CPST) hyperspace is
The smart world originates with an appearance of established by merging the thinking space into the
computer networks, and Internet subsequently emerges cyber-physical-social space. Human cognition along with
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H. Ning et al.: From Internet to Smart World

interactions of data, information, knowledge and intelligence consistency should be considered to achieve seamless
are through the CPST hyperspace. mapping between physical space and cyber space.
An embryo of the smart world is associated with a concept • Cyber space is characterized by the discrete, logical,
of hyperworld, which originally refers to real-digital direct and switched computation, communication, and control.
mappings between physical space and cyber space involving It refers to the generalized information resources,
hyper-connected multi-worlds [5]. The hyperworld resem- including digital abstractions to achieve interconnec-
bles a preliminary cyber-physical-social system, in which tions among the cyber entities. The cyber infrastructures
the social attributes address complicated interconnections are required to support uniform standards and protocols,
through the cyber-physical-social space. Thereafter, the smart and to transform the cyber space into an intelligent infor-
world focuses on ubiquitous intelligence of things being mation ecosystem. The holographic data management,
attached, embedded or blended with sensors, actuators, on-demand resource management, and spontaneous
middlewares, interfaces, and other network components in service management are required to support cyber
practical applications [6]. It covers dynamic contexts of interactions.
complex physical, human, social environments and the asso- • Social space is an integration of social attributes and
ciated cyber space. A digital copy or counterpart of a real social intra-/inter- relationships owned by human beings
individual (i.e., Real-I) is defined as a cyber individual and other physical objects/cyber entities. The social
(i.e., Cyber-I), and comprehensive mapping relationships are space is formally described in semantic representations
established between a Real-I and the corresponding one to address issues such as ownership control manage-
or multiple Cyber-Is [7]. Along with distributed comput- ment, affiliation relationship modeling, trustworthiness
ing developing towards cloud based web computing, mobile evaluation, and human behavior formalization. Human
communication based mobile computing, and contexts learning principles (e.g., cognitive psychology, and
based social computing, the smart world becomes a cyber decision neuroscience) and social rules are introduced
space driven hyperspace to address the holographic data, to enhance human-nature coexistence.
information, knowledge, and wisdom oriented physical per- • Thinking space focuses on cognition issues of human
ception, cyber interaction, social correlation, and cognitive beings and other things, which are reflections of human
thinking. brains’ activities and things’ observations on objec-
tive existences in the hyperspace. The thinking space
mainly addresses the processes of analysis, synthesis,
judgment, and reasoning based on representations
and abstract conceptions. A concept of Internet of
Thinking (IoTk) was first presented on an open forum
‘‘Top 10 Questions in Intelligent Informatics/
Computing’’ in World Intelligence Congress for Turing
Year [8]. The IoTk is expected that human, nature,
and society are collaborative beyond space-time con-
straints, and human subjective initiative may break
cyber-physical-social limitations.
The CPST hyperspace emphasizes convergence to
FIGURE 1. The cyber-physical-social-thinking hyperspace. facilitate integration, interconnection, and interaction in the
heterogeneous environments. Seamless data, information,
II. THE CYBER-PHYSICAL-SOCIAL-THINKING knowledge, and wisdom exchanging measurement for
HYPERSPACE the geographically dispersed individuals is anticipated
Fig. 1 illustrates CPST hyperspace model involving to enhance human thoughts to realize an aggregated
quaternionic cyber-physical-social-thinking dimensions. functionality. The quaternionic hyperspace convergence is
• Physical space refers to natural and human-made significative for the self-organization of cognitive thinking,
systems operated in applications, in which physical and it is an attractive perspective of ‘‘thinking being accessed,
objects are perceived and controlled by ubiquitous transferred, discovered, and shared’’ like other cyber,
sensors and actuators to establish interactions via infor- physical and social resources.
mation, communication and networking technologies
(e.g., remote collaboration, real-time localization, and III. MAIN CHARACTERISTICS AND CHALLENGES
autonomy maintenance). The physical space mainly OF THE SMART WORLD
addresses the issues such as network infrastructures, The smart world is established based on the cyber-
heterogeneous interfaces, and interactive environments, physical-social-thinking hyperspace, and there are four main
in which semantic sensors, cooperative actuators, characteristics including physical-based coordination,
context-aware networks along with energy consumption, social-inspired interactivity, brain-abstracted cooperativity,
electromagnetic spectrum compatibility, and space-time and cyber-enabled homogeneity, as shown in Fig. 2.

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FIGURE 2. The main characteristics of the smart world.

A. PHYSICAL-BASED COORDINATION • Networks and contexts coordination: Networks and

Physical-based coordination means that the physical contexts coordination propels context-aware networks,
objects establish mutual assistance relationships involving referring to network architectures, protocols, services,
critical infrastructures, heterogeneous interfaces, and communications and applications. Information centric
interactive environments. During the physical objects’ network emerges as a context-aware paradigm [10],
coordination, there are several challenging issues. How to which applies content identifiers for enabling context-
deal with an ultimate limit of Moore’s Law? How to guar- based operations through information centric channel
antee the time-space consistent between physical objects and access, adaptive routing, packet switching and resolu-
the corresponding cyber entities under the heterogeneous tion functions. Network middlewares facilitate context-
sensing, communication, and storage environments? aware services such as social services, migratory
How to realize exascale computing by breaking through the services, location services, and multimedia services in
bottlenecks including memory, communication, reliability, heterogeneous networks.
and energy? The physical-based coordination includes the
following main aspects.
• ID-objects and nID-objects coordination: The identifier B. SOCIAL-INSPIRED INTERACTIVITY
based objects (i.e., ID-objects) and non-identifiers based Social-inspired interactivity addresses the human beings
objects (i.e., nID-objects) establish cooperative oriented applications in both physical and cyber spaces,
relationships [9]. The non-identifiers mainly refer in which a person is a comprehensive peer with other
to spatiotemporal, biometric and physicochemical networked persons for unrestricted interaction and resource
attributes, which are used for object recognition based on sharing. During the data driven interconnections, Real-Is and
temporal and spatial uniqueness, physiological attributes Cyber-Is are assigned with the capabilities of accessing trans-
(e.g., fingerprint, hand geometry, iris, and palm vein), parency, dynamic participation, and accountability.
behavioral attributes (e.g., typing rhythm, and gait), and • Interactivity between a Real-I and a Cyber-I : Cyber-I
other nonunique attributes (e.g., frequency spectrum, is a digital copy or counterpart of a Real-I with social
and electromagnetic scattering). Note that the attribute considerations, and aims to achieve the perfect
nID-objects as necessary supplements for ID-objects copy of an individual’s internal behaviors. It is a com-
have no available identifiers for direct identification, prehensive digital organism to describe the mapping
authentication, and addressing. between a Real-I in the physical space and the cor-
• Sensors and actuators coordination: The wireless responding Cyber-Is in the cyber space. Interactivity
sensor-actuator networks are typical forms of sen- between a Real-I and a Cyber-I is established, and the
sors and actuators coordination with motivations of Real-I owns inherent and acquired relationships with
automation covering broad domains with real-time other Real-Is or Cyber-Is. The Cyber-I is regarded as
requirements. The sensors act as detectors and con- another self in the cyber space, and adopts data aggrega-
verters to capture physical data for perception, and tions to address individual modeling in individual-aware
semantic sensors should be designed to provide applications. The main interactive relationships include
semantic-integration context awareness for supporting the following aspects [7]: 1) enabling a Real-I to own
meta-service based adaptability and scalability. The one or more Cyber-Is with symbiotic relationships in the
actuators convert the received physical data into cyber space; 2) enabling comprehensive human model-
action commands to realize enhanced efficiency in ing involving individual thinking cognition; 3) enabling
self-adaptive modes, and collaborative actuators should customized services (e.g., individual-aware service
be organized in interconnected ecosystems to achieve recommendations) and other ubiquitous applications
aggregated functionality. (e.g., service discovery).

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H. Ning et al.: From Internet to Smart World

• Interactivity among multiple Cyber-Is: Social attributes

reflect direct/indirect correlations so that socialized
relationships exist among multiple Cyber-Is such as
collaboration, ownership, communal sharing, equality
matching, and authority ranking. A social network game
is an online community covering the main components
of multi-identifier, status control, assets management,
relationship management, resource management, and FIGURE 3. The main aspects of cyber-enabled homogeneity.
trustworthiness management. Interactivity among
multiple Cyber-Is are organized in autonomous modes
to improve social intelligence, and socialized services between a person’s brain and a thing’s brain? Will be a cyber
become noteworthy for the Cyber-Is with social brain more smarter than a real brain? Will does a thing’s brain
awareness (e.g., social relationships and interactions) control a person’s brain?
considerations. From the perspective of social network-
ing services, the Cyber-Is’ interactivity can be analyzed D. CYBER-ENABLED HOMOGENEITY
for identifying local and global social patterns, deter- Cyber-enabled homogeneity refers to ubiquitous things with
mining influential entities, and monitoring social rela- different features developing towards an unity of the same
tionship topology dynamics. nature driven in the cyber space. Almost all cyber entities
are formalized by specific rules, models, and semantics.
C. BRAIN-ABSTRACTED COOPERATIVITY Existing approaches such as object oriented modeling,
Brain-abstracted cooperativity is a reflect of the IoTk, resource description framework (RDF), web ontology
in which cognitive thinking is regarded as the control of language (OWL), and physical markup language (PML) with
associating including the process of analysis, synthesis, particular applicability have emerged as dominant perspec-
judgment, and reasoning based on representations and tives, and there is less unified cyber entity oriented model-
abstract conceptions. Cognitive thinking aims to perceive, ing framework for universal applications. During a physical
interpret, represent and model the surrounding environments object mapping into the cyber space as one or multiple
and contexts for decision-making and forecasting, and refers cyber entities, the physical object’s behaviors, tendencies,
to thinking activities to establish direct mappings of cyber- and events should be associated with the corresponding cyber
thinking spaces [3]. Human physiological and mental char- entities in dynamic representations. Fig. 3 shows the main
acteristics (e.g., conditioned reflex, attention allocation, and aspects of cyber-enabled homogeneity.
emotional control) are applied for designing more spiritual • Resource homogeneity: Resources refer to heteroge-
interactive mechanisms. neous elements of limited availability, and can be
Emerging sensing technologies are applied for brain accessed to support practical applications as essential
electrical signal identification, brain information acquisition, components during network connections and data
human consciousness extraction, and human behavior interactions. Physical objects and other components are
tendency prediction. Comprehensive human brain data involved in the cyber space to ensure interactive resource
collection realizes to copy and refine cognitive thinking cross-sharing and cross-utilization. Network infrastruc-
data to support intelligent interactions. Meanwhile, cogni- tures, communication channels, computing capabilities,
tive thinking data collection is achieve for inter-mapping memory storage, and frequency spectrum are typical
through cyber-physical-social spaces, in which human body resources, for which on-demand strategies should be
sensors are popular for detecting human brain wave and more generalized with negligible differences in the
other parameters. Heterogeneous human body area network smart world. For instance, frequency spectrum resources
communications are established for interconnections among are almost fully exploited and utilized, which may be
multiple individuals. Brain-abstracted cooperativity services addressed by aggregate programming based on comput-
are provided to achieve synergetic thinking, and thinking ing and communication resources; Dynamic spectrum
coordination activities are launched to facilitate an optimum allocation may be efficiently addressed according to the
interaction in the distributed environments. Brain-abstracted similar algorithms as existing energy allocation.
cooperativity promotes creative behaviors, activities, and • Service homogeneity: The service explosion is an
events for human society to achieve aggregated intelligent outcome of cloud computing, in which anything as a
services. service (XaaS) covers almost all forms of available
Meanwhile, Cyber-Is and other things also have brains to resources. Such heterogeneous resources are essentially
achieve ubiquitous intelligence, which brings several ethical the same, and service management confronts resources
issues. For instance, how to realize harmonious interactions related issues including semantic resource description,
between Real-Is’ real brain and Cyber-Is’ virtual brains? on-demand resource allocation, spontaneous resource
How to perform communication among a Real-I’s multiple discovery, and cooperative resource sharing. Web
Cyber-Is’ brains? How to establish consistent interactions services apply simple object access protocol (SOAP),

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Web services description language (WSDL), universal REFERENCES

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power information for supply-demand balance. In a
sense, wearable devices and AMI can be regarded
as functionality homogeneous due to the common
data acquisition, information processing, knowledge HUANSHENG NING (SM’13) received the
B.S. degree from Anhui University, in 1996,
extraction, intelligent computing, and remote cloud and the Ph.D. degree from Beihang University,
storage. in 2001. He is currently a Professor with the
Considering increasing data center sizes restrict the School of Computer and Communication Engi-
neering, University of Science and Technology
sustainable growth of the remote and geographically Beijing, China. He has authored over 50 papers in
distributed cloud services and network operators along with journals and international conferences/workshops.
explosive expansion of connections. Network architectures, His current research interests include Internet of
topologies, and routing protocols have been designed to Things, cybermatics, and electromagnetic sensing
and computing.
enhance network capacity and efficiency, and software
defined networks (SDN) emerge to manage network services
through abstraction of lower-level functionality. The HONG LIU received the Ph.D. degree from the
SDN differ from network virtualization (NV) and network School of Electronic and Information Engineer-
functions virtualization (NFV), which create virtual tunnels ing, Beihang University, China. She is currently
and functions to physical networks. While, the SDN essen- a Research Fellow with the Research Institute,
Run Technologies Company, Ltd., Beijing, China.
tially change physical networks to promote cyber-enabled She focuses on the security and privacy issues in
homogeneity, and bring the homogeneity of hardware com- wearable devices, vehicle-to-grid networks, and
ponents due to a centralized control plane separated from the Internet of Things. Her research interests include
traffic forwarding or switching plane. authentication protocol design, and security
formal modeling and analysis.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this work, a quaternionic cyber-physical-social-thinking
hyperspace has been identified, and an embryo of smart JIANHUA MA had 15 years’ working experience
with the National University of Defense Tech-
world is presented based on the heterogeneous spaces. The nology, Xidian University, and the University of
smart world is described according to the main characteristics Aizu, Japan. He is currently a Professor with the
including physical-based coordination, social-inspired inter- Department of Digital Media, Faculty of Com-
activity, brain-abstracted cooperativity, and cyber-enabled puter and Information Sciences, Hosei University,
Japan. He has authored over 200 papers, and edited
homogeneity, in which the challenging issues are accordingly over 20 books/proceedings and over 20 journal
discussed in the field of smart world. It indicates that the special issues. His research interests include mul-
smart world will be an attractive perspective to achieve a timedia, networks, ubiquitous computing, social
perfect convergence of cyber-physical-social-thinking hyper- computing, and cyber intelligence. He is the Co-Founder of the IEEE Inter-
national Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing, the IEEE
space, and launches comprehensive interactions of data, International Conference on Cyber, Physical and Social Computing, and the
information, knowledge and intelligence. IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things.

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LAURENCE T. YANG received the B.E. degree XIAOZHEN YE received the B.E. degree from the
in computer science from Tsinghua University, School of Computer and Communication Engi-
China, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science neering, University of Science and Technology
from the University of Victoria, Canada. He is Beijing, China, where she is currently pursuing the
currently a Professor with the School of Computer Ph.D. degree. She focuses on visual target detec-
Science and Technology, Huazhong University of tion and tracking. Her research interests include
Science and Technology, China, and the Depart- selective sensing and virtual reality.
ment of Computer Science, St. Francis Xavier
University, Canada. His research interests include
parallel and distributed computing, and embed-
ded and ubiquitous/pervasive computing. His research is supported by
the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Canada
Foundation for Innovation.
RUNHE HUANG received the Ph.D. degree in
computer science and mathematics from the Uni-
versity of the West of England, in 1993. She has
YUELIANG WAN received the Ph.D. degree from been involved in the field of computer science
the School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute and engineering since 1982. She is currently
of Technology, China. He is currently the Director a Professor with the Faculty of Computer and
of the Research Institute with Run Technologies Information Sciences, Hosei University, Japan.
Company, Ltd., Beijing, China. He focuses on the Her research fields include artificial intelligence
content security in Internet, multimedia analysis, and its applications, distributed intelligence com-
and Internet search and mining. His research inter- puting, big data mining and service computing,
ests include Internet multimedia retrieval, privacy mobile computing, ubiquitous intelligence computing, cloud computing, and
protection, and data center network. hyper-world modeling. She is a member of ACM.

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