Building Smart Systems to Satisfice User Intention in Situ: A Look Back to the Future*

The world is evolving in a pace faster than ever, in terms of the ways in which human can interact with the rest of the world virtually or physically. Our exploration together with Carl along the road involves many models and methods that help better understand users' needs, desires and intentions, specify clearer system requirements and know-how, describe simpler service interface to find a match between requests and capabilities. There are implicit relations between these research topics, namely, building smarter software systems that can adapt to the needs and intentions of users, as well as the concrete operational context and environment. This paper may look retro-futurism in a sense, as we are looking forward to fulfillment the early AI and SE visions, by reviewing viable fundamental software requirements engineering principles and service system thinking methods, and at the same time by making sense of the on-going development of smart applications with the latest intelligent computing technologies.