Professor Kamin Whitehouse visits Columbia and ICSL

Sensing People in the Home
Kamin Whitehouse
Commonwealth Associate Professor
University of Virginia
Abstract:
“Smart home” technology allows people to improve the comfort, convenience, and energy usage of their homes by monitoring and controlling the appliances, fixtures and equipment in the home. However, it remains an open challenge to monitor the most interesting things inside the home: the people. Without the use of cameras, microphones, or wearable tags, today’s energy monitoring systems cannot tell who left the lights on, and elderly monitoring systems cannot tell who is sleeping well or accessing the medicine cabinet. The next research challenge in this domain is to monitor the identities, locations, and activities of people in the home without causing them inconvenience or infringing on their privacy. In this talk, I’ll discuss the major challenges of monitoring individual people in a multi-person home, as well as several emerging approaches and applications.
 
Speaker Bio:
Kamin Whitehouse works in the areas of wireless embedded systems, with a focus on intelligent buildings.  He is a Commonwealth Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia, is a Siebel scholar, and was awarded NSF CAREER award. He earned his BA and BS from Rutgers University and his MS and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.