250,312 research outputs found
Why aren't we all living in Smart Homes
No full textVisions of the Future, like the Jetsons cartoons, show homes which are smart and able to control household appliances, to make living easier and more comfortable. Although much research has been carried out into the effectiveness of different visualisation techniques for conveying useful energy consumption information to householders, and in techniques for controlling the timing and coordination of appliance use, these techniques have failed to achieve widespread penetration, and the vision still seems far from a reality. This paper examines the reasons why smart home technologies have so far failed to have any real impact, which is intricately intertwined with the design of visualisations in this context, and why we are not already living in Smart Homes. It examines these questions under four sections: Technology, Consumers, Electricity retailers and Government agencies, using examples from New Zealand’s electricity sector
Field evaluation of a deep learning-based smart variable-rate sprayer for targeted application of agrochemicals
No full textThe field performance of a newly developed novel smart variable-rate sprayer was evaluated. The sprayer uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for target detection and spot-applications of agrochemicals within potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) fields attacked by lamb's quarters (Chenopodium album L.) and corn spurry (Spergula arvensis L.) weeds and the early blight potato disease caused by Alternaria solani Sorauer. There was a non-significant effect of treatment conditions (i.e., cloudy, partly cloudy, and sunny) on spray volume during weed and diseased plant detection experiments (p-value = 0.93 and 0.75, respectively) showing that the smart sprayer performed well during all treatment conditions. There was a significant effect of spraying application techniques on the use of spray volume (p-value ≤ 0.05) reflecting a significant saving of spraying liquid during variable-rate application (VA). On average, the sprayer reduced spray volume by 47 and 51% for weeds and diseased plant detection experiments as compared to the values of chemicals applied at constant-rate application (CA), respectively, under all treatment conditions. The analysis of water-sensitive papers (WSP) data resulted in non-significant differences between CA and VA under all field conditions. These results suggest that this sprayer has a great potential to get a suitable spot application of agrochemicals and reduce the use of plant protection products thereby ensuring farm profits and environmental stewardship.Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canad
Intelligent Energy Optimization for User Intelligible Goals in Smart Home Environments
No full textIntelligent management of energy consumption is one of the key issues for future energy distribution systems, smart buildings, and consumer appliances. The problem can be tackled both from the point of view of the utility provider, with the intelligence embedded in the smart grid, or from the point of view of the consumer, thanks to suitable local energy management systems (EMS). Conserving energy, however, should respect the user requirements regarding the desired state of the environment, therefore an EMS should constantly and intelligently find the balance between user requirements and energy saving. The paper proposes a solution to this problem, based on explicit high-level modeling of user intentions and automatic control of device states through the solution and optimization of a constrained Boolean satisfiability problem. The proposed approach has been integrated into a smart environment framework, and promising preliminary results are reporte
Semantically Enabled Service-Oriented Architectures: An Enabler for Smart Business Networks
No full textThe term Smart Business Networks refers to two things: Firstly, an
emerging concept for the agile composition of e-business value chains, and secondly a new stream of research, combining Management and Computer Science. While there exists a coherent vision of Smart Business Networks and the associated functionality, there is insufficient understanding of why creating and maintaining such infrastructure and networks is as difficult as being experienced in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we (1) trace back the complexity of issues such as partner selection, process composition, or execution monitoring to the lack of semantics in the description of system "elements", (2) propose a semantically-enabled service-oriented architecture (SESA) as the foundational layer - or "Operating System" - for Smart Business Networks, and (3) show how our approach may significantly reduce the complexity of the core network management tasks by lifting them to a higher level of abstraction
SAT based Enforcement of Domotic Effects in Smart Environments
No full textThe emergence of economically viable and efficient sensor technology provided impetus to the development of smart devices (or appliances). Modern smart environments are equipped with a multitude of smart devices and sensors, aimed at delivering intelligent services to the users of smart environments. The presence of these diverse smart devices has raised a major problem of managing environments. A rising solution to the problem is the modeling of user goals and intentions, and then interacting with the environments using user defined goals. `Domotic Effects' is a user goal modeling framework, which provides Ambient Intelligence (AmI) designers and integrators with an abstract layer that enables the definition of generic goals in a smart environment, in a declarative way, which can be used to design and develop intelligent applications. The high-level nature of domotic effects also allows the residents to program their personal space as they see fit: they can define different achievement criteria for a particular generic goal, e.g., by defining a combination of devices having some particular states, by using domain-specific custom operators. This paper describes an approach for the automatic enforcement of domotic effects in case of the Boolean application domain, suitable for intelligent monitoring and control in domotic environments. Effect enforcement is the ability to determine device configurations that can achieve a set of generic goals (domotic effects). The paper also presents an architecture to implement the enforcement of Boolean domotic effects, and results obtained from carried out experiments prove the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight the responsiveness of the implemented effect enforcement architectur
Detection of Cognitive Features from Web Resources in Support of Cultural Modeling and Analysis
No full textThe World Wide Web serves as a valuable source of culture-relevant information, which can be used to support cultural modeling and analysis activities. Part of the challenge in exploiting the Web as a source of culture-relevant information relates to the need to detect and extract information about beliefs, attitudes, and values from a variety of different resources. The Web thus features a rich variety of information resources, and these are seldom categorized with respect to the dimensions in which cultural analysts are interested. Exploiting the Web as a source of culture-relevant information therefore requires techniques and approaches that enable cultural analysts to extract relevant information and organize extracted content in various ways. In this paper, we outline an approach to assist cultural analysts in the extraction and organization of relevant information. We show techniques that can be used to extract information about the attitudes, beliefs, and values of individuals, and how this data can, in turn, be used to support cultural modeling and analysis
Exploring the Dynamics of Collective Cognition Using a Computational Model of Cognitive Dissonance
No full textThe socially-distributed nature of cognitive processing in a variety of organizational settings means that there is increasing scientific interest in the factors that affect collective cognition. In military coalitions, for example, there is a need to understand how factors such as communication network topology, trust, cultural differences and the potential for miscommunication affects the ability of distributed teams to generate high quality plans, to formulate effective decisions and to develop shared situation awareness. The current paper presents a computational model and associated simulation capability for performing in silico experimental analyses of collective sensemaking. This model can be used in combination with the results of human experimental studies in order to improve our understanding of the factors that influence collective sensemaking processes
Exercise in the smart workplace
No full textPaper presented at the 1st International Workshop on Smart Offices and Other Workplaces (SOOW'09), held in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE’09), Barcelona, Spain, 20-21 July, 2009Employees that engage in even moderate amounts of exercise during their working day suffer less from stress and are more tolerant in the various irritations that accompany normal working life. Though it cannot be said with certainty that such workers are more productive, tentative evidence suggest that this may well be the case. A useful service of a smart office or work environment is to contribute to the health and well-being of those that inhabit such spaces. One practical approach to this is to monitor the exercise that employees engage in during the day, and using this as a basis, motivate them to engage in further physical activity. In this paper, issues relating to monitoring employee physical activity are explored.Science Foundation IrelandConference detailshttp://intelligentenvironments.org/conferences/ie0
Smart cities, smart mobilities, and children
No full textThe smart city has surfaced as pivotal in global discussions around unsustainable urban environments, but children, although constituting a major part of the global urban population,is surprisingly absent in these discussions. This text delves into the intersections of children’s mobility and sustainable urbanism, by arguing that empirical studies of children’s everyday mobilities and practices is crucial for understanding and working toward ‘smart’ cities. The need to conceptualize mobility as an assemblage of human and non-human relations, of technologies and the material, is central in this enterprise. Conceptualizing children’s mobilities as an assemblage is a fruitful way of approaching sustainable urbanism and smart cities, by providing a bottom-up approach where children’s (creative) practices take center stage. Some findings from a two-year ethnographic project with children aged 7-13 years and their parents from middle-class households in Sweden, illustrate the creativity and playfulness of children’s everyday mobility practices. The author suggests that the everyday creative and playful mobility practices could provide a new frame for how to work toward ‘smart’ cities and sustainable urban environments.</p
P-Chain: Towards privacy-aware smart contract using SMPC
No full textSmart contract, as the representative application of blockchain, has recently fueled extensive research interests from both academia and industry. However, with its wide applications, the weaknesses of smart contract have been gradually revealed. The major barrier to the widespread adoption of smart contract involves concerns about on-chain privacy which refers to the details of input/output privacy. To address privacy concerns, we propose in this paper, P-Chain, a privacy-aware framework for smart contracts of permissioned blockchain to protect sensitive data of users based on Secure Multi-party Computation (SMPC). Unlike existing work that suffer several key drawbacks, including introducing a third party who could get the details of the deal, and high overhead for on-chain and off-chain communication, as well as lacking a privacy protection for output data, we enhance the privacy protection for smart contracts system by adding a new secure multi-party computation layer in P-Chain. Through secure multi-party computing, sensitive inputs of smart contracts are divided into multiple sub-inputs and sent to computing participants for operation respectively, which ensures that each participant can only access part of the user’s information. A stochastic strategy based o
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