Security is an important issue in Smart Home Environments. Most especially in situations where smart homes can store and release sensitive data to third parties, which makes data collected within smart environments vulnerable to severe security and privacy abuses. Therefore, identification of these security issues is crucial to taking the appropriate steps towards mitigating them and enhancing ...

In the past decade, smart home environment research has found application in many areas, such as activity recognition, visualization, and automation. However, less attention has been paid to monitoring, analyzing, and predicting energy usage in smart homes, despite the fact that electricity consumption in homes has grown dramatically. In this paper, we extract the useful features from sensor da...

Smart Environments, and in particular Smart Homes, have recently gained the attention of many researchers and hardware vendors. An increasing number of sensing devices, whose price is rapidly decreasing, are available on the market. Although such devices are becoming familiar in Smart Homes, user acceptance is limited by the fragmentation of the market. Heterogeneous technologies do not integra...

The value of smart environments in understanding and monitoring human behavior has become increasingly obvious in the past few years. Using data collected from sensors in these environments, scientists have been able to recognize activities that residents perform and use the information to provide context-aware services and information. However, less attention has been paid to monitoring and an...

The field of domotics and building automation is not really new, and the concept of smart homes and buildings has been a recurring theme in the media for some time. However, while it cannot be considered a complete failure, it certainly has not fully delivered on its promises. Skepticism around the concept is not rare and has even tarnished it with a " rich geek toys " stereotype. But this is c...

The data mining and pervasive sensing technologies found in smart homes offer unprecedented opportunities for providing health monitoring and assistance to individuals experiencing difficulties living independently at home. In order to monitor the functional health of smart home residents, we need to design technologies that recognize and track activities that people normally perform as part of...

Smart grids enhance power grids by integrating electronic equipment, communication systems and computational tools. In a smart grid, consumers can insert energy into the power grid. We propose a new energy management system (called RLbEMS) that autonomously defines a policy for selling or storing energy surplus in smart homes. This policy is achieved through Batch Reinforcement Learning with hi...

Enforcing security in Internet of Things environments has been identified as one of the top barriers for realizing the vision of smart, energy-efficient homes and buildings. In this context, understanding the risks related to the use and potential misuse of information about homes, partners, and end-users, as well as, forming methods for integrating security-enhancing measures in the design is ...

Smart homes have been viewed with increasing interest by both home owners and the research community in the past few years. One reason for this development is that the use of modern automation technology in the home or building promises considerable savings of energy, therefore, simultaneously reducing the operational costs of the building over its whole lifecycle. However, the full potential o...

In future smart homes functionality will be provided to the inhabitants by software services decoupled from the underlying hardware devices. While this will enhance flexibility and will allow to provide cross-functionalities across multiple devices it will also lead to resource conflicts. Future devices will provide basic functionalities which are used by separate higher level services. Each pe...