Foundations and Futures of Cloud Computing in Distributed Intelligence

Cloud computing has become one of the most discussed technologies in recent years and is considered a significant enabler in the bucket of supporting technologies for the inclusion of intelligent applications in all walks of life. Despite the name, “cloud computing” does not imply technology based on computers in clouds but rather distributed intelligence. If computer science is in its infancy today, distributed intelligence is the toddler stage for the long road the discipline has ahead.

The basic idea of cloud computing has existed in the community of computer users since the inception of the Internet; the technology has laid the foundation for intelligent service delivery. Distributed intelligence emerged when the explosion of services hosted in the cloud—the need for executing instructions, and therefore the application logic—was also outsourced from the local device to another flash of intelligence somewhere in the cloud. An explosion in intelligence implies an explosion in volumes of data and distributed applications being submitted relentlessly to the cloud for timely processing to assist in intelligent decision-making. Meeting this explosion demands more—intelligence gathered from the data centres is being sent back and distributed for execution to the fog nodes at the end of the network, close to the edge nodes, and the devices at the bottom to enable decisions quickly and real-time control; this is a nascent concept that is still evolving.