Principles of smart home control

Seeking to be sensitive to users, smart home researchers have focused on the concept of control. They attempt to allow users to gain control over their lives by framing the problem as one of end-user programming. But families are not users as we typically conceive them, and a large body of ethnographic research shows how their activities and routines do not map well to programming tasks. End-user programming ultimately provides control of de-vices. But families want more control of their lives. In this paper, we explore this disconnect. Using grounded contextual fieldwork with dual-income families, we describe the control that families want, and suggest seven design principles that will help end-user programming systems deliver that control

Equilibrium Trip Scheduling in Congested Traffic under Uncertainty

Whilst traditional modeling and research efforts put emphasis on the effect of congestion on travel choices, recently more and more studies examine the notion of travel time uncertainty on travel decision. In particular, travel time reliability forms an important component in modeling route choice and trip scheduling. This paper considers equilibrium trip scheduling under random travel delay in a single bottleneck. Travelers form a heterogeneous population with distinctive requirements on the probability of punctual arrival and each with a different valuation toward earliness and lateness. The analysis shows that random delay plays a significant role in travel costs and introduces substantial differences in the queuing pattern, departure and arrival times, as compared with the traditional deterministic model