  In this paper we introduce our vision of a Cognitive Computing Continuum to
address the changing IT service provisioning towards a distributed,
opportunistic, self-managed collaboration between heterogeneous devices outside
the traditional data center boundaries. The focal point of this continuum are
cognitive devices, which have to make decisions autonomously using their
on-board computation and storage capacity based on information sensed from
their environment. Such devices are moving and cannot rely on fixed
infrastructure elements, but instead realise on-the-fly networking and thus
frequently join and leave temporal swarms. All this creates novel demands for
the underlying architecture and resource management, which must bridge the gap
from edge to cloud environments, while keeping the QoS parameters within
required boundaries. The paper presents an initial architecture and a resource
management framework for the implementation of this type of IT service
provisioning.
