An Intelligent Home System as a Development and Test Platform for Ubiquitous Computing

Abstract

Ubiquitous Computing is concerned with the thorough integration of information processing into everyday objects and activities. As such, someone engaging in ubiquitous computing should be able to enjoy the many benefits it is supposed to bring about at home. Since 2000, a team at the Department of Computing of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University has been developing an Ubiquitous Intelligent Home (UIH) that can demonstrate how a user can interact with “computers” at home in such a way that the user does not have to be aware that he or she is doing so. The UIH consists of four interconnecting networks: an appliance network, a furniture network, a telehealth network, and a security network. Each of these networks is made up of both hardware and software that are designed and developed to try to achieve the kind of ideal ubiquitous computing environment – one that is made up of small, inexpensive, robust networked processing devices, distributed at all scales throughout everyday life. The UIH project has so far been “pervasive” not only in terms of its potential applications but also in terms of the researchers involved. Throughout its development, we have involved researchers in almost all areas of computing including those working on wireless sensor networking, sensor data management, data stream processing, RFID, embedded systems design, distributed processing, artificial intelligence, agent theory, speech recognition, image and video analysis, signal processing, data mining, computational intelligence, Chinese computing, data mining and machine learning, text mining, information retrieval, gesture recognition, biometrics, text-to-speech processing, software engineering, etc. In this talk, we will give the details of the UIH.