Intelligent Homes Are Closer Than People Think
The Wall Street Journal 2/23/04 www.wsj.com
Homes that use machine learning to anticipate owners’ needs based on their past behavior are being developed at the University of Texas-Arlington. At the University of Florida in Gainesville, researchers are using a cell phone to run a simulated apartment inside a lab. A real home should be finished by June.
In the interactive living room in Georgia Tech’s Aware Home, a large television screen helps people sift through their home videos to find specific clips. A computing professor there is developing software to tag each scene with information on the people involved, the occasion or even the car in the background. A video camera is being developed that can annotate scenes as they are recorded.
Already, people are buying egg-shaped lamps from Ambient Devices, Cambridge, Mass., that change colors when the stock market or outside temperatures rise or fall based on information from a wireless network