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In modern smarthomes, temperature regulation is achieved through a mix of traditional and emergent technologies including air conditioning, heating, intelligent utilization of the effects of sun, wind, and shade as well as using stored heat and cold. To achieve the desired comfort for the inhabitants while minimizing environmental impact and cost, the home controller must predict how its actions will impact the temperature and other environmental factors in various parts of the home. The question we are investigating in this paper is whether the temperature values in different rooms in a home are predictable based on readings from sensors in the home. We are also interested in whether increased accuracy can be achieved by adding sensors to capture the state of doors and windows of the given room and/or the whole home, and what type of machine learning algorithms can take advantage of the additional information. As experimentation on real-world homes is highly expensive, we use ScaledHome, a 1:12 scale, IoT-enabled model of a smart home for data acquisition. Our experiments show that while additional data can improve the accuracy of the prediction, the type of machine learning models needs to be carefully adapted to the number of data features available. 

In recent years, significant work has been done in technological enhancements for mobility aids (smart walkers). However, most of this work does not cover the millions of people who have both mobility and visual impairments. In this paper, we design and study four different configurations of smart walkers that are specifically targeted to the needs of this population. We investigated different sensing technologies (ultrasound-based, infrared depth cameras and RGB cameras with advanced computer vision processing), software configurations, and user interface modalities (haptic and audio signal based). Our experiments show that there are several engineering choices that can be used in the design of such assistive devices. Furthermore, we found that a holistic evaluation of the end-to-end performance of the systems is necessary, as the quality of the user interface often has a larger impact on the overall performance than increases in the sensing accuracy beyond a certain point. 

Many elderly individuals have physical restrictions that require the use of a walker to maintain stability while walking. In addition, many of these individuals also have age-related visual impairments that make it difficult to avoid obstacles in unfamiliar environments. To help such users navigate their environment faster, safer and more easily, we propose a smart walker augmented with a collection of ultrasonic sensors as well as a camera. The data collected by the sensors is processed using echo-location based obstacle detection algorithms and deep neural networks based object detection algorithms, respectively. The system alerts the user to obstacles and guides her on a safe path through audio and haptic signals. 

Augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) technologies can be deployed in a household environment for applications such as checking the weather or traffic reports, watching a summary of news, or attending classes. Since AR/VR applications are highly delay sensitive, delivering these types of reports in maximum quality could be very challenging. In this paper, we consider that users go through a series of AR/VR experience units that can be delivered at different experience quality levels. In order to maximize the quality of the experience while minimizing the cost of delivering it, we aim to predict the users’ behavior in the home and the experiences they are interested in at specific moments in time. We describe a deep learning based technique to predict the users’ requests from AR/VR devices and optimize the local caching of experience units. We evaluate the performance of the proposed technique on two real-world datasets and compare our results with other baselines. Our results show that predicting users’ requests can improve the quality of experience and decrease the cost of delivery. 

Green homes require informed energy management decisions. For instance, it is preferable that a comfortable internal temperature is achieved through natural, energy-efficient means such as opening doors or lowering shades as opposed to turning on the air conditioning. This requires the control agent to understand the complex system dynamics of the home: will opening the window raise or lower the temperature in this particular situation? Unfortunately, developing mathematical models of a suburban home situated in its natural environment is a significant challenge, while performing real-world experiments is costly, takes a long time and depends on external circumstances beyond the control of the experimenter. In this paper, we describe the architecture of a physical, small scale model of a suburban home and its immediate exterior environment. Specific scenarios can be enacted using Internet of Things (IoT) actuators that control the doors and windows. We use a suite of IoT sensors to collect data during the scenario. We use deep learning-based temporal regression models to make predictions about the impact of specific actions on the temperature and humidity in the home. 

The rise of peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace paradigms has transformed existing marketplace models, but the extent to which this approach can be applied to the energy marketplace has yet to be considered. In this paper, we examine existing approaches taken in the application of a P2P paradigm to the energy marketplace, further presenting an approach towards facilitating an online P2P energy marketplace, implementing a prototype P2P web application named SolTrade. Furthermore, we submit initial statistics based on simulated transactions facilitated through the platform, which illustrate the physical impact of marketplace transactions on the energy grid. In particular, these results show that, as the number of users rises, the chance of overloading the grid rises, but the chance of the grid being unable to sustain itself without an external source of energy falls.