Making Sense of Smartness in the Context of Smart Devices and Smart Systems

Careless usage of the term smart in today’s world leads to wondering whether it means anything beyond involving a currently impressive application of IT. This paper characterizes smart and smartness in relation to describing, analyzing, and designing smart devices and systems. Examples of nominally smart devices and systems and principles that support thinking about smartness lead to a definition of smartness in the context of devices and systems. The definition leads to a classification matrix for smart capabilities organized around four categories: information processing, internal regulation, action in the world, and knowledge acquisition. Each category includes a set of separate capabilities that can be described on a continuum from not smart to somewhat smart to extremely smart based on the definition of smart. A concluding section describes how this multidimensional view of smartness can be applied in thinking about smartness while describing, analyzing, and designing devices and systems.

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