Human-Centric Computing

In light of rapidly changing world around us, humans need to adapt, potentially using the same technologies that are causing the changes in the first place. Various wearable devices have been or are being developed to do just that. Their potential to create a whole new set of human experiences is still largely unexplored. To be effective, functionality cannot be centralized and needs to be distributed to capture the right information at the right place. This requires a human intranet [1], a platform that allows multiple distributed input/output and information processing functions to coalesce and pursue a single goal (Fig. 1). Addressing the computational aspects of such an intranet is complicated by extreme energy and form-factor limitations, and requires innovation on all fronts ranging from computational models to heterogeneous integration.