What Would You Ask to Your Home if It Were Intelligent? Exploring User Expectations about Next-Generation Homes

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research is giving birth to a multitude of futuristic home scenarios and applications; however a clear discrepancy between current installations and research-level designs can be easily noticed. Whether this gap is due to the natural distance between research and engineered applications or to mismatching of needs and solutions remains to be understood. This paper discusses the results of a survey about user expectations with respect to intelligent homes. Starting from a very simple and open question about what users would ask to their intelligent homes, we derived user perceptions about what intelligent homes can do, and we analyzed to what extent current research solutions, as well as commercially available systems, address these emerging needs. Interestingly, most user concerns about smart homes involve comfort and household tasks and most of them can be currently addressed by existing commercial systems, or by suitable combinations of them. A clear trend emerges from the poll findings: the technical gap between user expectations and current solutions is actually narrower and easier to bridge than it may appear, but users perceive this gap as wide and limiting, thus requiring the AmI community to establish a more effective communication with final users, with an increased attention to real-world deploymen

Enabling Machine Understandable Exchange of Energy Consumption Information in Intelligent Domotic Environments

In the 21st century, all the major countries around the world are coming together to reduce the impact of energy generation and consumption on the global environment. Energy conservation and its efficient usage has become a top agenda on the desks of many governments. In the last decade, the drive to make homes automated and to deliver a better assisted living picked pace and the research into home automation systems accelerated, usually based on a centralized residential gateway. However most devised solutions fail to provide users with information about power consumption of different house appliances. The ability to collect power consumption information can lead us to have a more energy efficient society. The goal addressed in this paper is to enable residential gateways to provide the energy consumption information, in a machine understandable format, to support third party applications and services. To reach this goal, we propose a Semantic Energy Information Publishing Framework. The proposed framework publishes, for different appliances in the house, their power consumption information and other properties, in a machine understandable format. Appliance properties are exposed according to the existing semantic modeling supported by residential gateways, while instantaneous power consumption is modeled through a new modular Energy Profile ontolog

Home Energy Consumption Feedback: A User Survey

Buildings account for a relevant fraction of the energy consumed by a country, up to 20-40% of the yearly energy consumption. If only electricity is considered, the fraction is even bigger, reaching around 73% of the total electricity consumption, equally divided into residential and commercial dwellings. Building and Home Automation have a potential to profoundly impact current and future buildings' energy efficiency by informing users about their current consumption patterns, by suggesting more efficient behaviors, and by pro-actively changing/modifying user actions for reducing the associated energy wastes. In this paper we investigate the capability of an automated home to automatically, and timely, inform users about energy consumption, by harvesting opinions of residential inhabitants on energy feedback interfaces. We report here the results of an on-line survey, involving nearly a thousand participants, about feedback mechanisms suggested by the research community, with the goal of understanding what feedback is felt by home inhabitants easier to understand, more likely to be used, and more effective in promoting behavior changes. Contextually, we also collect and distill users' attitude towards in-home energy displays and their preferred locations, gathering useful insights on user-driven design of more effective in-home energy display

JEERP: Energy Aware Enterprise Resource Planning

Ever increasing energy costs, and saving requirements, especially in enterprise contexts, are pushing the limits of Enterprise Resource Planning to better account energy, with component-level asset granularity. Using an application-oriented approach we discuss the different aspects involved in designing Energy Aware ERPs and we show a prototypical open source implementation based on the Dog Domotic Gateway and the Oratio ER

Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

The Smart Home Controller on Your Wrist

This paper addresses human-home interaction mediated by everyday objects, with a particular focus on wrist watches. Everyday wrist-worn devices are turned into flexible home access points by exploiting a modular architecture independent from the underlying home automation system, and from the specific watch device, provided that the necessary capabilities are available. A first working prototype based on a cost-effective consumer watch is presented, and experimental results confirm the viability of the approach

Template-based ontology population for Smart Environments configuration

Smart Environment is one of several domains in which Semantic Web technologies are applied nowadays. Ontologies, in particular, are used as core modeling languages for representing devices, systems and environments. Developing such ontologies, that typically involve several device descriptions (individuals) and related information, i.e., individuals of classes contributing to the device model, is often done by a manual, time consuming, and error-prone approach. Flexible and semi-automatic tools are therefore needed to enhance ontology population and to enable end-users to fruitfully configure their Smart Environments without the intervention of an ontology expert. This paper presents a template based approach, which increases accuracy, ease of use, and time-effectiveness of the ontology population process by reducing the amount of user-given information of about an order of magnitude, with respect to the fully manual approach. User-required information only pertains device features (e.g., name, location, etc.) and never implies knowledge of Semantic Web technologies, thus enabling end-user configuration of smart homes and buildings. Experimental results with a prototypical implementation confirm the viability of the approach on a real-world use cas

iMole, a web based image retrieval system from biomedical literature

iMole is a platform that automatically extracts images and captions from biomedical literature. Images are tagged with terms contained in figure captions by means of a sophisticate text-mining tool. Moreover, iMole allows the user to upload directly their own images within the database and manually tag images by curated dictionary. Using iMole the researchers can develop a proper biomedical image database, storing the images extracted from paper of interest, image found on the web repositories, and their own experimental images. In order to show the functioning of the platform, we used iMole to build a 2DE database. Briefly, tagged 2DE gel images were collected and stored in a searchable 2DE gel database, available to users through an interactive web interface. Images were obtained by automatically parsing 16,608 proteomic publications, which yielded more than 16,500 images. The database can be further expanded by users with images of interest trough a manual uploading process. iMole is available with a preloaded set of 2DE gel data at http://imole.biodigitalvalley.co

Design Recommendations for Smart Energy Monitoring: a Case Study in Italy

In the era of green energy and smart grids, the ability to access energy information and effectively analyze such data to extract key performance indicators is a crucial factor for successful building management. Energy data can in fact be exploited both in long-term policy adaptation and in shorter term habits modification, providing the basis for stable improvements of the overall efficiency of buildings and dwellings. To reach the ambitious goal of actually improving how buildings consume energy, four main challenges emerge from literature: (a) lack of skills and experience of energy managers, (b) complex and disparate data sets, which are currently blocking decision making processes, (c) mostly-manual work-flows that struggle to find relevant information into overwhelming streams of data sourced by monitoring systems, and (d) lack of collaborations between organizational departments. This paper provides deeper insights on these challenges, by investigating the kind of analysis currently performed by energy managers (in Italy) and the expectations they have if required to reason about systems that will be available within the next five years, and proposes design recommendations for next generation energy intelligence systems

Complex Event Processing for City Officers: A Filter and Pipe Visual Approach

Administrators and operators of next generation cities will likely be required to exhibit a good understanding of technical features, data issues, and complex information that, up to few years ago, were quite far from day-to-day administration tasks. In the smart city era, the increased attention to data harvested from the city fosters a more informed approach to city administration, requiring involved operators to drive, direct, and orient technological processes in the city more effectively. Such an increasing need requires tools and platforms that can easily and effectively be controlled by non-technical people. In this paper, an approach for enabling "easier" composition of real-time data processing pipelines in smart cities is presented, exploiting a visual and block-based design approach, similar to the one adopted in the Scratch programming language for elementary school students. The proposed approach encompasses both a graphical editor and a sound methodology and workflow, to allow city operators to effectively design, develop, test, and deploy their own data processing pipelines. The editor and the workflow are described in the context of a pilot of the ALMANAC European project