Our paper “DomAIn: Towards Programless Smart Homes” has been accepted for publication in ACM HumanSys 2025 and received the Best Paper Award! This work is a collaboration with Northwestern University.
This work tackles a critical barrier to smart home adoption: the complexity of programming automation tasks. While 70% of U.S. homes have smart devices, widespread adoption remains limited because current platforms require users to manually program step-by-step logic, severely limiting accessibility.
DomAIn revolutionizes this by introducing a smart home platform that automatically generates and deploys automation logic from simple voice commands—no programming required. Users can say “Alert me if someone falls” and DomAIn automatically creates appropriate sensor pipelines based on available devices and user preferences across four dimensions: accuracy, privacy, coverage, and power efficiency.
Key innovations include:
- Voice-to-Automation: Simple spoken commands automatically generate complex sensor pipelines
- Preference-Based Optimization: Creates privacy-focused pipelines that minimize camera usage or power-efficient solutions using minimal energy
- Dynamic Adaptability: Automatically reconfigures when devices fail or become unavailable
The system was validated through real-world deployments using various sensors including cameras, microphones, vibration detectors, and programmable drones, demonstrating practical applicability across diverse smart home scenarios.
Congratulations to Yueyuan Sui, Yiting Zhang, Yanchen Liu, Minghui Zhao, Kaiyuan Hou, Jingping Nie, and the team from Northwestern University and Columbia University!
This work represents a significant step toward truly intelligent homes that adapt to users’ needs rather than requiring users to adapt to technology limitations.
For more details, please refer to our paper here.
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