Smart homes and their users: a systematic analysis and key challenges

Published research on smart homes and their users is growing exponentially, yet a clear understanding of who these users are and how they might use smart home technologies is missing from a field being overwhelmingly pushed by technology developers. Through a systematic analysis of peer-reviewed literature on smart homes and their users, this paper takes stock of the dominant research themes and the linkages and disconnects between them. Key findings within each of nine themes are analysed, grouped into three: (1) views of the smart home—functional, instrumental, socio-technical; (2) users and the use of the smart home—prospective users, interactions and decisions, using technologies in the home; and (3) challenges for realising the smart home—hardware and software, design, domestication. These themes are integrated into an organising framework for future research that identifies the presence or absence of cross-cutting relationships between different understandings of smart homes and their users. The usefulness of the organising framework is illustrated in relation to two major concerns—privacy and control—that have been narrowly interpreted to date, precluding deeper insights and potential solutions. Future research on smart homes and their users can benefit by exploring and developing cross-cutting relationships between the research themes identified.     

Privacy-preserving data infrastructure for smart home appliances based on the Octopus DHT

Smart homes are about to become reality, involving technology such as Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID), which enables querying for extended product information from the manufacturer or from public databases. However, every query for information issued from a smart home could adversely affect the privacy of its inhabitants. Since every Electronic Product Code assigned to RFID-equipped objects is unique, it is easily possible to create detailed and long-term customer profiles by linking queries on particular items to a specific person. In order to address the privacy problem, this paper proposes a novel peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructure for organized sharing and private querying of data, which is formed by many smart devices across several homes. The efficiency of this approach is examined with experiments involving several hundred nodes. Furthermore, larger peer-to-peer networks of smart home appliances are simulated. According to our evaluation, the proposed solution is able to satisfy real-time requirements in settings where smart devices are geographically close. Moreover, the architecture can be used to store information of nearly one million different products within a network of one thousand nodes, which is a reasonable size for a local collaborative infrastructure between smart homes in towns or cities.     

设备端基于深度学习的智能家居服务推荐框架

随着智能家居的普及,用户期望通过自然语言指令实现智能设备的控制,并希望获得个性化的智能家居服务。然而,现有的挑战包括智能设备的互操作性和对用户环境的全面理解。针对上述问题,提出一个支持设备端用户智能家居服务推荐个性化的框架。首先,构建智能家居的运行时知识图谱,用于反映特定智能家居中的上下文信息,并生成用例场景语句;其次,利用预先收集的通用场景下,用户的自然语言指令和对应的用例场景语句训练出通用推荐模型;最后,用户在设备端以自然语言管理智能家居设备和服务,并通过反馈微调通用模型的权重得到个人模型。在基本指令集、复述集、场景指令集三个数据集上的实验表明,用户的个人模型相比于词嵌入方法的准确率提升了6.5%~30%,与Sentence-BERT模型相比准确率提升了2.4%~25%,验证了设备端基于深度学习的智能家居服务框架具有较高的服务推荐准确率,能够有效地管理智能家居设备和服务。     

Appliances for whom? Considering place

We discuss homes as potential settings for the products of appliance design. We catalog the large international and regional differences. We look at differences in terms of infrastructure: heating, plumbing, electricity, and telephony. We examine differences in the home itself in terms of number of household members, and size of dwelling. We explore the implications of this variation for future ethnographies as well as product creation as we ask the question “appliances for whom?”     

PostBits: using contextual locations for embedding cloud information in the home

Placing information at specific locations in the home provides rich and intuitive ways for people to cope with information, as they leverage semantics of the locations within the home. However, there is no deeper investigation yet on how users would embed digital cloud-based information into various locations in their homes, partly because previous systems were not robust enough to be deployed in real settings for an extended period of time. To this end, we have developed PostBits, a system of display blocks that integrate cloud information with contextually rich physical space. PostBits were designed for long battery life, robust communication and simple interactions, to enable a field deployment. A field study was conducted with 6 families, each using the system in their home for 1 week. We have identified patterns and strategies of how users embed cloud information at contextual locations in the home, and reflect on future design opportunities.     

Analyzing settings for social identity management on Social Networking Sites: Classification,current state,and proposed developments

The rising prevalence of Social Networking Sites (SNS) and their usage in multiple contexts poses new privacy challenges and increasingly prompts users to manage their online identity. To address privacy threats stemming from interacting with other users on SNS, effective Social Identity Management (SIdM) is a key requirement. It refers to the deliberate and targeted disclosure of personal attribute values to a subset of one's contacts or other users on the SNS. Protection against other entities such as the site operator itself or advertisers and application programmers is not covered by SIdM, but could be incorporated in further refinement steps. Features and settings to perform SIdM have been proposed and subsequently implemented partly by some SNS. Yet, these are often isolated solutions that lack integration into a reference framework that states the requirements for successfully managing one's identity. In this article, such a reference framework of existing and desired SIdM settings is derived from identity theory, literature analysis, and existing SNS. Based thereupon, we examine the SIdM capabilities of prevalent SNS and highlight possible improvements. Lastly, we reason about developing a metric to objectively compare the capability of SNS in regards to their support for SIdM.     

The Impact of Symmetry on Software Distributed Shared Memory

A homeless protocol is one in which all nodes are treated identically when they access common resources. By contrast, home-based protocols assign a home or manager to each resource. Use of the resource by the home incurs less overhead than use by other processors. The key to good performance in such systems is to ensure that the asymmetry of the underlying protocol is skewed in the same way as that of the application. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of invalidation-based homeless and home-based software DSM protocols. We pay particular attention to those performance differences caused by symmetric and asymmetric features of the protocols. We then show how the picture changes when update protocols are targeted. We show that a modified home-based protocol can significantly outperform more general protocols in this application domain because of reduced protocol complexity. We further optimize our protocol by completely eliminating such memory manipulation calls from the steady-state execution. Our resulting protocol improves average application performance by a further 34%, on top of the 19% improvement gained by our initial modification of the home-based protocol.     

Privacy in targeted advertising on mobile devices: a survey

Targeted advertising has transformed the marketing landscape for a wide variety of businesses, by creating new opportunities for advertisers to reach prospective customers by delivering personalised ads, using an infrastructure of a number of intermediary entities and technologies. The advertising and analytics companies collect, aggregate, process, and trade a vast amount of users’ personal data, which has prompted serious privacy concerns among both individuals and organisations. This article presents a comprehensive survey of the privacy risks and proposed solutions for targeted advertising in a mobile environment. We outline details of the information flow between the advertising platform and ad/analytics networks, the profiling process, the measurement analysis of targeted advertising based on user’s interests and profiling context, and the ads delivery process, for both in-app and in-browser targeted ads; we also include an overview of data sharing and tracking technologies. We discuss challenges in preserving the mobile user’s privacy that include threats related to private information extraction and exchange among various advertising entities, privacy threats from third-party tracking, re-identification of private information and associated privacy risks. Subsequently, we present various techniques for preserving user privacy and a comprehensive analysis of the proposals based on such techniques; we compare the proposals based on the underlying architectures, privacy mechanisms, and deployment scenarios. Finally, we discuss the potential research challenges and open research issues.

     

A privacy self-assessment framework for online social networks

During our digital social life, we share terabytes of information that can potentially reveal private facts and personality traits to unexpected strangers. Despite the research efforts aiming at providing efficient solutions for the anonymization of huge databases (including networked data), in online social networks the most powerful privacy protection “weapons” are the users themselves. However, most users are not aware of the risks derived by the indiscriminate disclosure of their personal data. Moreover, even when social networking platforms allow their participants to control the privacy level of every published item, adopting a correct privacy policy is often an annoying and frustrating task and many users prefer to adopt simple but extreme strategies such as “visible-to-all” (exposing themselves to the highest risk), or “hidden-to-all” (wasting the positive social and economic potential of social networking websites). In this paper we propose a theoretical framework to i) measure the privacy risk of the users and alert them whenever their privacy is compromised and ii) help the users customize semi-automatically their privacy settings by limiting the number of manual operations. By investigating the relationship between the privacy measure and privacy preferences of real Facebook users, we show the effectiveness of our framework.     

Involving users in the wild—Participatory product development in and with online communities

In its traditional stance, participatory design (PD) is centred on certain work/application settings and is concerned with the involvement of representative users from these contexts. Nevertheless, current web technologies enable new forms of distributed participation which might allow PD processes to be implemented in a broader and flexible way, but may at the same time raise new issues in relation to participation. In this paper, we report on a Participatory Product Development project, using social technologies, where new issues were raised—a large population of heterogeneous and globally distributed users; a range of personal and institutional purposes, and the use of these technologies in a largely untested environment. We will reflect on insights that we gathered by through observation of and participation in a software development process driven and influenced by members of an existing online community. By means of participatory observation, analysis of the use of online tools and through semi- structured interviews we identified issues around different notions of timeliness and of process structures that are related to different roles, responsibilities and levels of experience. Our results indicate that the involvement of heterogeneous users in such a context needs to be handled carefully, for the reasons we set out. The role of user representatives acting for a broader online community can become crucial when managing heterogeneity, formulating acceptable compromises and- perhaps most crucially- dealing with different professional and ‘hobbyist’ worldviews. Additionally, we found that the use of standard web technologies only partly support online participation processes. PD ‘in the wild’ needs to be better embedded in use situations and environments (e.g., by linking discussion and design space, using feedback tools, continuous reflection of the current state of development) rather than refining participatory design as a meta-process separate from use.     

Designing for Sustainability: Key Issues of ICT Projects for Ageing at Home

Achieving the sustainability of IT-based solutions is a challenge. We will argue in this paper that it is helpful to conceptualize designing for sustainable IT-based solutions as taking place in a multi-dimensional space. It requires thinking about how a project is framed; the perspectives and commitments of the project partners; the type of innovation that is foregrounded; the motivations and needs of the user group; and the level of sustainability a project or research program may achieve. The paper describes some of the challenges and possible solutions by revisiting a portfolio of projects that developed IT support for elderly people who continue living in their own homes.     

Why do few assistive technology systems make it to market? The case of the HandyHelper project

Assistive technologies, such as telecare monitoring applications installed in the home, are being promoted to help reduce pressure on health care systems caused by an aging population and as such promise a large market for new products. However, despite many projects undertaken by commercial companies, and despite significant investments both by the companies and by national and international funding programs in the EU, such systems are not widespread. This paper reports on a retrospective study of the development of one early system, HandyHelper. We were interested in what challenges the development team faced and why the system is no longer on the market. Qualitative research methods were applied, including document analysis and interviews of key people involved in its development. Even though the system worked technically, the input of older users was sought, and a pilot installation was run, the development was stopped. The findings from a thematic analysis point to complex issues. Some problems were avoidable, e.g., by providing more support for new users, though other problems point to inherent tensions, such as the different needs of sensor-based security features and interactive services aimed at the older users. Yet other aspects are outside of the developer’s control, such as available public funding. We summarize these findings and suggest lessons learnt for future projects.

     

Providing universally accessible interactive services through TV sets: implementation and validation with elderly users

One of the challenges that Ambient Intelligence (AmI) faces is the provision of a usable interaction concept to its users, especially for those with a weak technical background. In this paper, we describe a new approach to integrate interactive services provided by an AmI environment with the television set, which is one of the most widely used interaction client in the home environment. The approach supports the integration of different TV set configurations, guaranteeing the possibility to develop universally accessible solutions. An implementation of this approach has been carried out as a multimodal/multi-purpose natural human computer interface for elderly people, by creating adapted graphical user interfaces and navigation menus together with multimodal interaction (simplified TV remote control and voice interaction). In addition, this user interface can also be suited to other user groups. We have tested a prototype that adapts the videoconference and the information service with a group of 83 users. The results from the user tests show that the group found the prototype to be both satisfactory and efficient to use.     

网络游戏案例研究: 用户行为分析和流失预测过

用户流失预测在很多领域得到关注,目前主流的用户流失预测方法是使用分类法。网络游戏领域发展迅猛,但用户特征选取、特征处理和流失预测的相关研究较少。本文以一款网页网络游戏的用户记录为数据,对用户游戏行为进行分析对比,发现流失用户在游戏投入、博彩热情、玩家互动方面与正常用户存在显著差异;同时发现网络游戏数据存在样本分布不平衡、候选特征库庞大和干扰差异多等难点。在此分析基础上,本文探讨了网游用户的关键特征提取的关注方向,以及归一化和对齐化在特征处理中的关键作用。实验表明,本文提取的特征具有很好的区分度。     

User-defined challenges and desiderata for robotics and autonomous systems in health and social care settings

ABSTRACT

We report the needs and challenges identified by health and social care professionals and service users for robotics and autonomous systems that are of importance to researchers and policymakers. To this end, we held eight workshops in different locations across Cornwall (UK) in which we raised awareness of the applications and opportunities of assistive robots. The 223 participants could interact physically with four robots, watched a multimedia presentation including video and use-case scenarios and then took part in 33 focus groups. Content analysis was carried out based on summaries written by facilitators during the focus groups. The focus groups produced 163 challenges that may have digital solutions including 78 suitable for robotic assistive technology, in three main areas: maintaining independence at home, social isolation, and rurality. Although further research is needed with technology and its implementation, this study shows that health and social care professionals, patients, carers, and students are willing to consider using robotics and autonomous systems in health and social care settings.     

Design and analysis of a social botnet

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have attracted millions of active users and have become an integral part of today’s web ecosystem. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands, OSNs can be used to harvest private user data, distribute malware, control botnets, perform surveillance, spread misinformation, and even influence algorithmic trading. Usually, an adversary starts off by running an infiltration campaign using hijacked or adversary-owned OSN accounts, with an objective to connect with a large number of users in the targeted OSN. In this article, we evaluate how vulnerable OSNs are to a large-scale infiltration campaign run by socialbots: bots that control OSN accounts and mimic the actions of real users. We adopted the design of a traditional web-based botnet and built a prototype of a Socialbot Network (SbN): a group of coordinated programmable socialbots. We operated our prototype on Facebook for 8 weeks, and collected data about user behavior in response to a large-scale infiltration campaign. Our results show that (1) by exploiting known social behaviors of users, OSNs such as Facebook can be infiltrated with a success rate of up to 80%, (2) subject to user profile privacy settings, a successful infiltration can result in privacy breaches where even more private user data are exposed, (3) given the economics of today’s underground markets, running a large-scale infiltration campaign might be profitable but is still not particularly attractive as a sustainable and independent business, (4) the security of socially-aware systems that use or integrate OSN platforms can be at risk, given the infiltration capability of an adversary in OSNs, and (5) defending against malicious socialbots raises a set of challenges that relate to web automation, online-offline identity binding, and usable security.     

A Survey of User-Centred Approaches for Smart Home Transfer Learning and New User Home Automation Adaptation

Recent smart home applications enhance the quality of people’s home experiences by detecting their daily activities and providing them services that make their daily life more comfortable and safe. Human activity recognition is one of the fundamental tasks that a smart home should accomplish. However, there are still several challenges for such recognition in smart homes, with the target home adaptation process being one of the most critical, since new home environments do not have sufficient data to initiate the necessary activity recognition process. The transfer learning approach is considered the solution to this challenge, due to its ability to improve the adaptation process. This paper endeavours to provide a concrete review of user-centred smart homes along with the recent advancements in transfer learning for activity recognition. Furthermore, the paper proposes an integrated, personalised system that is able to create a dataset for target homes using both survey and transfer learning approaches, providing a personalised dataset based on user preferences and feedback.     

From Home to Home Page: New Challenges to Basic Notions of Privacy and Property

The notion of "home" is a critical organizing principle for how we understand the relationship between individuals and society at large. A wide range of cultural and legal practices enshrine the home with various protections that ensure us a degree of privacy, security, solitude, and control over our lives there. As our private papers migrate to the Web, activities that we could previously conduct in "private" have seemingly been thrown open to unfettered public view. Additionally, as increasingly powerful communication technologies reach into our homes, places that were once private become more connected to public life     

A general transformation from KP-ABE to searchable encryption

Users are inclined to share sensitive data in a remote server if no strong security mechanism is in place. Searchable encryption satisfies the need of users to execute a search encrypted data. Previous searchable encryption methods such as “public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS)” restricted the data access to certain users, because only the assigned users were able to search the encrypted data. In this paper we will discuss the relation between Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and searchable encryption and define a weak anonymity of the ABE scheme, named “attribute privacy”. With this weak anonymity, we propose a general transformation from ABE to Attribute Based Encryption with Keyword Search (ABEKS) and a concrete attribute private key-policy ABE (KP-ABE) scheme. We present an ABEKS scheme based on this KP-ABE scheme and permit multi-users to execute a flexible search on the remote encrypted data.