Sustainable Smart City—Opening a Black Box

Learning in a Black Box ∗

Many interactive environments can be represented as games, but they are so large and complex that individual players are mostly in the dark about others’ actions and the payoff structure. This paper analyzes learning behavior in such ‘black box’ environments, where players’ only source of information is their own history of actions taken and payoffs received. The context of our analysis are dec...

Smart Box Software Framework

Building Sustainable Smart Homes

The increasing usage of computer technology in our everyday life and especially in our homes and the increasing demand for sustainable life style concepts raise the question of how to combine these two trends. Can we make smart homes sustainable or sustainable homes smart? This paper discusses current trends and challenges arising with these questions and proposes a sustainable smart home appro...

Sustainable and Smart: Rethinking What a Smart Home Is

The term Smart Home typically refers to dwellings augmented with high-tech responsive systems such that heating, air conditioning, lighting, appliances, entertainment outlets, and architectural components are computerized and managed, often via a remote control. Smart homes promise comfort, convenience, and resource conservation in the near future. Yet the notion of increased dependency on tech...

Black-Box Testing of Grey-Box Behavior

A key aspect of the Object-Oriented (OO) approach is that a designer can enrich an OO system by providing suitable (re-)definitions for some of the methods of the given system. Application frameworks provide good examples of such enrichment. An OO framework typically provides a number of template methods that implement specific patterns of calls to hook methods. An application developer can cus...