Leveraging social media and IoT to bootstrap smart environments

Abstract

As we move towards an era of Smart Environments, mixed technological and social solutions must be examined to continue to allow users some control over their environment. Realisations of Smart Environments such as Smart Cities and Smart Buildings bring the promise of an intelligently managed space that maximises the requirements of the user while minimising resources. Our approach is to create lightweight Cyber Physical Social Systems that aim to include building occupants within the control loop to allow them some control over their environment. We motivate the need for citizen actuation in Building Management Systems due to the high cost of actuation systems. We define the concept of citizen actuation and outline an experiment that shows a reduction in average energy usage of 26%. We outline a use case for citizen actuation in the Energy Management domain, propose architecture (a Cyber-Physical Social System) built on previous work in Energy Management with Twitter integration, use of Complex Event Processing (CEP), and discuss future research in this domain.