GE 2313 Global IT Case Studies

Lecture 11: Smart Home & Community

Dr. Linqi Song
Department of Computer Science
 Home

From Sweet Home to Smart Home

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 What is Smart Home?
• It is one of the applications of Smart
technologies within our home, in creating a
comfortable home and an effective lifestyle;
• It improves automation control and monitoring of
household devices and
• Connect via standard means of communication
for its operation.

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Why smart home?

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Examples

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Security – locking system

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Security – monitoring system

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Security – access control

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 Assisted living and healthcare
• SMART homes offer benefits for the disabled and elderly
persons in the various ways:
– Monitory systems
– Automated alarm systems directly connected to hospitals in
cases of incidents like a fall or collapse
– Alert systems for the notification on prescribed medications

More focus on this topic will be given in our next lecture! 9

Energy efficiency at home: an example of GE

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Home automation systems: Comfort/Ease of control

• Smart Home offers ease of controlling devices around

the home. This is one of its outstanding feature.
• These features offers automation and remote control of
devices around the home from any location within such
as:
– Automatic control of garage door and gate(s);
– Automatic shut down of appliance when not in use;
– Automatic setting and maintenance of right temperature for each room;
– Automatically adjust/ regulate light intensity based on room luminosity.

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Automatic garage doors and gates

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Automatic appliance control

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Automatic air-conditioning

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Automatic lighting

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 Voice & gesture control
 Alexa or Google Home:
– Weather, Shopping, Music, News, To do lists, Jokes, Timers, Math,
Definitions, Calendar…
– “Alexa, what’s the weather today?”
– “Alexa, find me a nearby pizza restaurant”
– “Alexa, play some music”
– “Alexa, how many cups are in an ounce?”

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NLP applications in voice assistance

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A rough history

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 Natural language processing (NLP)
• Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield
of computer science, information engineering,
and artificial intelligence concerned with the
interactions between computers and human
(natural) languages, in particular how to program
computers to process and analyze large
amounts of natural language data.

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Applications of NLP

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Survey: what do you use voice assistance for?

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Survey on voice assistance

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Survey: teenagers vs. adults

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Entertainment at home

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 A video for smart home 2019
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnrjEEksvJo

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Challenges of Smart Home Technologies
• Ethical questions about privacy and data
protection on the Smart Home devices
• Cost of implementation
• More vulnerabilities in the over-all systems
• Complexities in the multiple functionality of
the technology
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Discussions

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 Discuss the following topics
• Do you have any experience of smart home products in your daily life? What
are them and how was the experience? What improvements do you think
they need to make? Can you envision future smart home technologies?

• What are the pros and cons of voice assistance? Can you give two
examples of each? What are the trends of voice assistance systems and
what new technologies can be used in such systems? What are the barriers
do you think that restrict the usage of such systems?

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Presentations

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