Personal Cognitive Engineering: Mission, Engineering Methodology & Reference Architecture

This paper defines Personal Cognitive Engineering as the applied engineering discipline through which Personal Cognitive Computing is translated into architectures, systems, shared capabilities, reference implementations and domain solutions. It establishes the discipline’s mission, engineering methodology and reference architecture, with particular emphasis on personal authority, inspectability, evidence-grounded reasoning, modularity, local-first operation on affordable, consumer-owned hardware, and the separation of storage, retrieval and reasoning. It also positions Nivel as a reference implementation through which these principles can be developed, tested and evaluated in practice. Part of the PCC Foundation trilogy.