Pervasive computing environments such as smart homes require a mechanism to easily integrate and manage numerous and heterogeneous sensors and actuators into the system. Additionally, the smart space should be assembled programmatically by software developers instead of hardwired by engineers and system integrators. However, most available sensor platforms are not adequate for this task. Atlas ...

We present an unsupervised approach for discovery of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) in a smart home. Activity discovery is an important enabling technology, for example to tackle the healthcare requirements of elderly people in their homes. The technique applied most often is supervised learning, which relies on expensive labelled data and lacks the flexibility to discover unseen activities. ...

As the number of elderly people in our society increases, the need of assistive technologies in home becomes urgent. Existing techniques allow elderly people to be better assisted through monitoring what goes on in smart homes and inferring their activities from sensor data via a recognition model. However, there are various cases that existing models have difficulties in accommodating relation...

Integrating the power grid technology with renewable power generation technologies, Demand Response (DR) programs enabled by the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) were introduced into the power grid in the interest of both utilities and residents. They help to achieve load balance and increase the grid reliability by encouraging residents to reduce their power usage during peak load period...

The major task of a grid operator is perfectly balancing the demand of all customers at any instant with supply. One of the facets of the Smart Grid vision is tackling the problem of balancing demand with supply using strategies that act on the demand side. With the deployment of intelligent ICT devices in domestic environments, homes are becoming smarter and able to optimise the electricity co...

The pervasive sensing technologies found in smart homes offer unprecedented opportunities for providing health monitoring and assistance to individuals experiencing difficulties living independently at home. A primary challenge that needs to be tackled to meet this need is the ability to recognize and track functional activities that people perform in their own homes and everyday settings. In t...