Interacting with Smart Environments: Users, Interfaces, and Devices

The present article summarises the doctoral dissertation of Luigi De Russi

Interacting with Smart Environments: Users, Interfaces, and Devices

A Smart Environment is an environment enriched with disappearing devices, acting together to form an “intelligent entity”. In such environments, the computing power pervades the space where the user lives, so it becomes particularly important to investigate the user’s perspective in interacting with her surrounding. Interaction, in fact, occurs when a human performs some kind of activity using any computing technology: in this case, the computing technology has an intelligence of its own and can potentially be everywhere. There is no well-defined interaction situation or context, and interaction can happen casually or accidentally. The objective of this dissertation is to improve the interaction between such complex and different entities: the human and the Smart Environment. To reach this goal, this thesis presents four different and innovative approaches to address some of the identified key challenges. Such approaches, then, are validated with four corresponding software solutions, integrated with a Smart Environment, that I have developed and tested with end-users. Taken together, the proposed solutions enable a better interaction between diverse users and their intelligent environments, provide a solid set of requirements, and can serve as a baseline for further investigation on this emerging topic

dWatch: a Personal Wrist Watch for Smart Environments

Intelligent environments, such as smart homes or domotic systems, have the potential to support people in many of their ordinary activities, by allowing complex control strategies for managing various capabilities of a house or a building: lights, doors, temperature, power and energy, music, etc. Such environments, typically, provide these control strategies by means of computers, touch screen panels, mobile phones, tablets, or In-House Displays. An unobtrusive and typically wearable device, like a bracelet or a wrist watch, that lets users perform various operations in their homes and to receive notifications from the environment, could strenghten the interaction with such systems, in particular for those people not accustomed to computer systems (e.g., elderly) or in contexts where they are not in front of a screen. Moreover, such wearable devices reduce the technological gap introduced in the environment by home automation systems, thus permitting a higher level of acceptance in the daily activities and improving the interaction between the environment and its inhabitants. In this paper, we introduce the dWatch, an off-the-shelf personal wearable notification and control device, integrated in an intelligent platform for domotic systems, designed to optimize the way people use the environment, and built as a wrist watch so that it is easily accessible, worn by people on a regular basis and unobtrusiv

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

Towards Understanding the Dark Patterns That Steal Our Attention

Contemporary digital services often adopt mechanisms, e.g., recommendations and infinite scrolling, that exploit users' psychological vulnerabilities to maximize time spent and daily visits. While these attention-capture dark patterns might contribute to technology overuse and problematic behaviors, they are relatively underexplored in the literature. In this paper, we first provide a definition of what are attention-capture dark patterns based on a review of recent works on digital wellbeing and dark patterns. Then, we describe a set 5 of attention-capture dark patterns extracted from a 1-week-long auto-ethnography during which we self-monitored our mobile and web interactions with Facebook and YouTube. Finally, we report on an initial study (N=7) that explores whether and how a widespread mechanism, i.e., social investment, influence usage and users' perception of the Facebook website. We discuss the implications that our work may have on the design of technologies that better align with users' digital wellbeing

Recognizing Student Research through Symposia and Competitions

Most major computer science and engineering conferences have low paper-acceptance rates to maintain high-quality presentations and results, and dedicated funds for student attendance are often limited. However, student participation in conferences is important as they are the next generation of researchers. To overcome this problem, more conferences are organizing student-related activities, such as student research symposia and competitions

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

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

Training Engineers for the Ambient Intelligence Challenge

The increasing complexity of the new breed of distributed intelligent systems, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), which require a diversity of languages and protocols, can only be tamed with design and programming best practices. Interest is also growing for including the human factor, as advocated by the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research field, whose focus is on transparently and intelligently supporting people. These new design methodologies are increasingly needed in the toolbox of new electronic and computer engineers, and teaching strategies should be devised that allow students to acquire a systems-level view instead of getting lost in technology-oriented approaches. This paper describes a study carried out over two academic years, in a course in ambient intelligence at Politecnico di Torino, Italy. In the course, a project-based learning approach was adopted, in which students design and prototype an AmI system, and their progress is closely monitored throughout the semester. The paper presents the learning goals and teaching strategies, analyzes the learning outcomes from the qualitative and quantitative points of view, and highlights the lessons learned in the process