We are creating smart building technology to improve building efficiency by using information about occupant locations and activities. For example, the demo below illustrates how our system can track the identity, location, and activity of occupants, without the need for beacons, wearable tags, cameras, or microphones. This information is being used to more strategically employ heating and cooling only when needed, and to give occupants fine-grained feedback about electricity and water usage. Preliminary results using data from 8 homes indicate that our approach can save 28% of HVAC energy with only $25 in sensors. Ongoing research is extending these results several ways, and recent deployments include more than 1200 sensors deployed in over 20 homes. Details are available in the publications listed below.

The video below demonstrates how our technology tracks a person through a building and identifies activities (such as using the kitchen lights or sink), without requiring the person to wear any sensors or install any cameras or microphones in the house. The system does this using only about a dozen sensors, which are mounted on the doorways, the electrical mains, and water mains. The target cost of a production version of this system is about $300. The interface shown to the left is used on an Android smart phone, and also provides controls for temperature and zoning.

UPDATE: this new video is a live demo, where all tracking and recognition electrical/water loads is performed live in real time!

New York Times	Turn On the Server. It's Cold Inside., Nov 26, 2011
Wired	Jargon Watch: Pitstops, War-Texting, Data Furnace, Nov 1, 2011
Popular Science	Steamy Cloud Servers Installed In Homes and Businesses Could Be Used As Furnaces, July 25, 2011
Slashdot	Microsoft Suggests Heating Homes With "Data Furnaces", July 26, 2011
Slashdot	Why Waste Servers' Heat?, July 23, 2011
Discover Magazine	Will Your Next Furnace Be A Server Farm?, July 2010
Tech Crunch	"Data Furnace" Would Heat Homes While Flipping Bits, July 25, 2011
TG Daily	How to heat your home with a data furnace, July 29, 2011
ExtremeTech	Microsoft suggests heating your home with Data Furnaces, July 26, 2011
UberGizmo	Data furnace idea warms homes, crunches bits and bytes, July 25, 2011
Microscope	Cloud computing is a lot of hot air (and it can heat your house), July 25, 2011
E-News	U.Va. Researchers Secure $2 Million National Science Foundation Grant to Smart Energy Systems, September, 2010
The Associated Press	UVa gets grant for 'smart building' research, Sept 2010
The Cavalier Daily	'Smart building' team earns grant, September 24, 2010
NBC29 evening news	UVA Researching Efficiency Technology, Sept 2010 (cached video)
E-News	U.Va. Researchers Secure $2 Million National Science Foundation Grant to Smart Energy Systems, September, 2010

Jiakang Lu and Kamin Whitehouse. Smart Blueprints: Automatically Generated Maps of Homes and the Devices Within Them. To appear in The 10th Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive'12). June 18-22, 2012, Newcastle, UK.

Jiakang Lu and Kamin Whitehouse. SunCast: Fine-grained Prediction of Natural Sunlight Levels for Improved Daylight Harvesting. The 11th ACM Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'12). April 16-20, 2012, Beijing, China.
(15% acceptance rate)

Timothy Hnat, Vijay Srinivasan, Jiakang Lu, Tamim Sookoor, Raymond Dawson, John Stankovic, Kamin Whitehouse. The Hitchhiker's Guide to Successful Residential Sensing Deployments. To appear in The 9th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensing Systems (SenSys'11). November 2-4, 2011, Seattle, WA. (ppt)
(19.5% acceptance rate)

Vijay Srinivasan, John Stankovic and Kamin Whitehouse. WaterSense: Water Flow Disaggregation using Motion Sensors. The 3rd ACM Workshop On Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings (BuildSys), held in conjunction with ACM SenSys. November 1, 2011, Seattle, WA. (ppt)

Jie Liu, Michel Goraczko, Sean James, Christian Belady, Jiakang Lu, Kamin Whitehouse. The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing. The 3rd USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud'11). Jun 14-15, 2011. Portland, OR.

Jiakang Lu, Tamim Sookoor, Vijay Srinivasan, Gao Ge, Brian Holben, John Stankovic, Eric Field, Kamin Whitehouse. The Smart Thermostat: Using Occupancy Sensors to Save Energy in Homes. The 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensing Systems (SenSys). November 3-5, 2010, Zurich, Switzerland. (ppt)
(17% acceptance rate)

Jiakang Lu, Dagnachew Birru, Kamin Whitehouse. Using Simple Light Sensors to Achieve Smart Daylight Harvesting. The 2nd ACM Workshop On Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings (BuildSys), held in conjunction with ACM SenSys. November 2, 2010, Zurich, Switzerland.

Vijay Srinivasan, John Stankovic and Kamin Whitehouse. Using Height Sensors for Biometric Identification in Multi-resident Homes. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Pervasive Computing (Pervasive). Helsinki, Finland, May 17-20, 2010.
(23% acceptance rate)

Ge Gao and Kamin Whitehouse. The Self-Programming Thermostat: Optimizing Setback Schedules based on Home Occupancy Patterns. First ACM Workshop On Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings (BuildSys '09), held in conjunction with ACM SenSys. Berkeley, CA, Nov. 2009. (PPT)

Vijay Srinivasan, John A. Stankovic and Kamin Whitehouse. Protecting Your Daily In-home Activity Information from a Wireless Snooping Attack. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp). Seoul, Korea, September 2008.
(19% acceptance rate)

We gratefully acknowledge that this project is currently funded by:

• The National Science Foundation under Award# 1038271
• Trane, Inc Commercial Solutions under project "Improved Occupancy Sensing in Commercial buildings Using Occupant Flow Modeling"
• ESPRIT program under project "Validation of Energy Savings Potential from a Self-Programming Thermostat"