A Smart Physical World Based on Service Technologies, Big Data, and Game-Based Crowd Sourcing

The physical world is becoming smarter and smarter due to the advances in smart devices and CPS/IoT technologies. In this paper, we investigate the roles various cutting-edge technologies, such as service computing, big data analytics, crowd sourcing, gaming technologies, etc., can play to significantly enhance the intelligence of our physical environment and subsequently benefit the society. We consider a smart physical world (SPW) consisting of physical entities, cyber entities, and human. Service technologies can be used to model the entities in SPW and specify their capabilities. Service discovery and composition techniques can be used to, based on the modeling, compose these capabilities to solve real-world problems. To enable higher level intelligence, we further discuss how various technologies, such as big data analytics and artificial intelligence, can be used in the smart world to reason from sensor inputs to derive the situation facts, and from the situation facts to derive the reactive actions. From the derived actions (tasks), the service technologies can be used to compose the capabilities of the entities to realize the task. However, current technologies and artificial intelligence may fall short in many situations. We further propose a gaming-based crowd sourcing platform to make use of human intelligence to enable successful completion of some challenging reasoning and control tasks.