A review of the smart world

Smart world is an attractive prospect with comprehensive development of ubiquitous computing involving penetrative intelligence into ubiquitous things, including physical objects (e.g., wearable devices), cyber entities (e.g., cloud services), social people (e.g., social networking) and human thinking (e.g., brain cognition). This work systematically overviews related works in the field of the smart world, and explains prospects in emerging areas. The smart world evolutions are discussed through four progressive phases, and the representative projects are accordingly introduced. Meanwhile, smart world elements and the smart world driven applications are respectively analyzed in the contexts of cyber–physical–social-thinking hyperspace. Moreover, enabling technologies including ubiquitous intelligence, web intelligence, brain informatics, social computing, big data, and security and privacy are respectively discussed. Finally, perspectives referring to ubiquitous sensing, ubiquitous object modeling, smart services, and philosophical, ethical and legal issues, are presented for identifying trends and challenges in the smart world.