HA Philosophy

[Chris Hunter <cjhunter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

'must say, I saw the complex adaptive bit as a device to make the
software possible ... a few lines of code defining behaviours as against
upteen ifs & buts to cope with every circumstance (Resnick's traffic
example did just this) ... and neural-nets, too, 'though in a diferent
way, do much the same - tens of lines of code instead of thousands -

to put it another way, a complex adaptive  paogram would be of the form,
do this & that, keeping key parameters within defined limits (rather
than if this, do that, if that do this, etc, etc, etc, in an exhaustive
list) ... and the neural net approach would be essentially a matter of
curve-fitting complex data & controlling parameters to fall near the
line ... both being used in addition to conventional ways ...

so not too complicated, or too radical ... (!)

how does Idratek do its motion-sensing, I wonder ... it uses PIRs &
switches & CCTV, and whatever else is available ... how does it put it
all together ?

Chris


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Wednesday, 4 Oct'06 - 10:35:38 -0000

from: Mal Lansell   mal@xxxxxxx

My guiding-rule has always been guest-friendliness - if you have to
explain how to turn-on the lights, your system has failed.   It may be
heresy, but Home Automation, to me, involves very little in the way of
actual automation - the only things I automate are the entirely
predictable, such as garden irrigation or heating.   Everything else is
just simplification of otherwise complex tasks - lighting scenes,
instead of turning on individual lamps, for example, but still under
direct human control from a simple wall-switch rather than attempting
occupancy-detection or triggering from time-of-day events.

The biggest WAF I've had for HA has come from the Harmony remote', which
has reduced setting-up for a DVD from fiddling with four remote's to one
button-press.   The other favourite is the DVD database ... on our
intranet, complete with a movie-suggester - a window showing each title
in random order

http://www.lansell.org/mal/movies/movies.php

Simple & useful - that's the key.

Mal

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Wednesday, 4 Oct'06 - 19:07:47 +0100

from: David Gumbrell
david.gumbrell@xxxxxxx

I think you may be underestimating the training problem.   20q has the
benefit of getting millions of people to train it's system ... who
probably don't care that much when it gets it wrong.

The TiVo example wouldn't be any different with more sensors, it would
just require more training & still occasionally throw-up misbehaviours
... impossible to debug, because you won't know which factors led to
that behaviour.   If the pain of that misbehaviour outweighs the general
gain of all the correct behaviours, then the system has failed overall -
so, extending the TiVo example, it gets one-point for correctly
recording, say, Neighbours, because it wasn't that difficult to do with
conventional video, but gets minus fifty-points for recording Big
Brother, instead of the film on the sex-life of otters, on the other
side, which I would really like to have seen & is unlikely to be
repeated.   Similarly, if a SmartHome puts the lights on full-blast, in
the middle of the night, because you stayed-up late the previous night,
it isn't going to get much credit for all the times it put the light on
when you wanted - because a dumb light-switch could have got that correct.

There's 'some interesting research done in a fully adaptive house -
depending on the cost-model associated with dissatisfaction (academic
equivalent of WAF), it doesn't always seem to outperform traditional
methods.   Equally, some of the 'papers give plenty of anecdotal
evidence for the failure of programmed systems ... the researcher admits
that incorrect behaviours can be irritating ... I wonder if he lives
alone ?   His observations, on what works well, are interesting, eg:
heating-control has much greater acceptance of near-misses ... people
are relatively insensitive to small variations ... getting the lighting
wrong creates much greater dissatisfaction.   He has a bit of a downer
on explicit user-signalling  (eg: sleep mode), but I think this is a
purity problem - for example, very many people set an alarm-clock before
going to sleep ... why should this not also be used (or substituted) to
indicate the  current user ... is  sleeping, rather than some other
behaviour ?   Similarly, one of his anecdotes was a couple who couldn't
handle putting a SmartHome into I'm home mode - but, how many of us
perfectly-happily turn-off a burglar-alarm on returning-home ?   You
could argue ... these are sensors ... and ... could be treated as such
&
augment the adaptive systems input - but they could also form an updated
operational UI, in a programmed system.   Ironically, he notes ... the
adaptive system tends to work best for people with regular routines, to
the extent that occupants may actually regularise their behaviour to
fit-in with the house - talk about the tail wagging the dog ... and
programmed systems are condemned for enforcing rigid routines :-)

Most likely, 'will be some kind of hybrid approach, based on some
adaptive behaviour, within manually programmed constraint rules, to
avoid the exceptional cases, especially those with very high
dissatisfaction costs.

It's a hard problem !

Cheers,

David






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