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1. Home, Safehome: smart home reliability with visibility and atomicity

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3447786.3456261  

   Ahsan, Shegufta B.; Yang, Rui; Noghabi, Shadi A.; Gupta, Indranil (April 2021, EuroSys '21: Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Smart environments (homes, factories, hospitals, buildings) contain an increasing number of IoT devices, making them complex to manage. Today, in smart homes when users or triggers initiate routines (i.e., a sequence of commands), concurrent routines and device failures can cause incongruent outcomes. We describe SafeHome, a system that provides notions of atomicity and serial equivalence for smart homes. Due to the human-facing nature of smart homes, SafeHome offers a spectrum of visibility models which trade off between responsiveness vs. isolation of the smart home. We implemented SafeHome and performed workload-driven experiments. We find that a weak visibility model, called eventual visibility, is almost as fast as today's status quo (up to 23% slower) and yet guarantees serially-equivalent end states. 

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2. Home, SafeHome: Ensuring a Safe and Reliable Home Using the Edge

   Shegufta Bakht Ahsan, Rui Yang (July 2019, Proceedings Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Edge Computing (HotEdge) 2019)

   As smart home environments get more complex and denser, they are becoming harder to manage. We present our ongoing work on the design and implementation of ``SafeHome'', a system for management and coordination inside a smart home. SafeHome offers users and programmers the flexibility to specify safety properties in a declarative way, and to specify routines of commands in an imperative way. SafeHome includes mechanisms which ensure that under concurrent routines and device failures, the smart home behavior is consistent (e.g., serializable) and safety properties are always guaranteed. SafeHome is intended to run on edge machines co-located with the smart home. Our design space opens the opportunity to borrow and adapt rich ideas and mechanisms from related areas such as databases and compilers. Paper available (Open Access) at: https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotedge19/presentation/ahsan 

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3. Smart Home Beyond the Home: A Case for Community-Based Access Control

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376255  

   Tabassum, Madiha; Kropczynski, Jess; Wisniewski, Pamela; Lipford, Heather Richter (April 2020, 2020 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
4. Smart Home beyond the Home: A Case for Community-based Access Control

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376255  

   Tabassum, M. (April 2020, Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020))

   As smart devices are becoming commonplace in homes, we need to explore the needs of not just the residents of the home, but also of secondary stakeholders who may be granted access to these devices from outside of the home. We conducted a mixed methods study, which included a survey of 163 smart home device owners and a follow-up interview with 13 individuals who currently share their smart home devices with others outside of their home. Nearly half (47.8%) of our survey participants shared at least one smart home device with someone that did not live with them. Individuals sought greater safety and security by providing remote access to trusted family members or friends. By understanding users' perspectives about privacy and trust in relation to sharing smart home devices beyond the home, we build a case for community-based access control of smart home devices in the Internet of Things. 

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5. Music@Home–Retrospective: A new measure to retrospectively assess childhood home musical environments

   https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-024-02469-2  

   Kathios, Nicholas; Lopez, Kelsie L; Gabard-Durnam, Laurel Joy; Loui, Psyche (October 2024, Behavior Research Methods)

   Early home musical environments can significantly impact sensory, cognitive, and socioemotional development. While longitudinal studies may be resource-intensive, retrospective reports are a relatively quick and inexpensive way to examine associations between early home musical environments and adult outcomes. We present the Music@Home–Retrospective scale, derived partly from the Music@Home–Preschool scale (Politimou et al., 2018), to retrospectively assess the childhood home musical environment. In two studies (totaln = 578), we conducted an exploratory factor analysis (Study 1) and confirmatory factor analysis (Study 2) on items, including many adapted from the Music@Home–Preschool scale. This revealed a 20-item solution with five subscales. Items retained for three subscales (Caregiver Beliefs, Caregiver Initiation of Singing, Child Engagement with Music) load identically to three in the Music@Home-–Preschool Scale. We also identified two additional dimensions of the childhood home musical environment. The Attitude Toward Childhood Home Musical Environment subscale captures participants’ current adult attitudes toward their childhood home musical environment, and the Social Listening Contexts subscale indexes the degree to which participants listened to music at home with others (i.e., friends, siblings, and caregivers). Music@Home–Retrospective scores were related to adult self-reports of musicality, performance on a melodic perception task, and self-reports of well-being, demonstrating utility in measuring the early home music environment as captured through this scale. The Music@Home–Retrospective scale is freely available to enable future investigations exploring how the early home musical environment relates to adult cognition, affect, and behavior. 

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