Digital Explosions and Digital Clones

Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) not only offer us novel digital services, but also transport us to new worlds, the digital cyber world and the cyber-physical integrated hyper world. These new worlds possess new fundamental characteristics including digital explosions of data, connectivity, service and intelligence, providing new ways to study humanity, even digitally clones humans. This article sets out to explain these digital explosions by examining the history of information revolutions, to discuss digital clones based on our study of the cyber-individual (Cyber-I), and describe a corresponding Cyber-I open service platform called COSP to support global and long-term joint work and research on digital clones. Basic challenges and problems concerning Cyber-I research are also discussed.