ETH Zurich : Computer Science : Pervasive Computing : Distributed Systems : Education : Student Projects : Abstract

Semantics for Smart Things: Machine Interaction within Smart Environments (M)

Status: Abgeschlossen

The Internet of Things and Web of Things projects are about interconnecting everyday objects and giving them the ability to communicate and cooperate within smart environments.

This project specifically aims at enabling human users and machines to find and make use of Web-enabled devices depending on their location. For instance, when a user enters his living room, his mobile phone could display information about devices in this room and offer a user interface. An especially interesting possibility here is the use of location-based macros that execute whenever a change of location is detected: For instance, a currently playing music stream could be transferred to the sound system of the room just entered.

Within previous projects in our group, several primitives to enable such functionality have been implemented - we have access to an indoor localization system for networked devices and an infrastructure that provides discovery and look-up services. Furthermore, a reasoning backend allows human and machine users to define specific goals (e.g., "temperature at my location should be 21°C") and then uses embedded semantic information in smart devices to find the correct commands to be executed to reach that goal.

Within this thesis (Bachelor, Master, or Lab Project), you will further explore the possibilities that arise from embedding such information into smart devices. Specifically, the integration of machine-machine and human-machine interaction might be an interesting topic - for instance, a smart environment could itself propose certain goals to a human user based on the available smart devices and context information. In any case, there is enough room to accomodate your ideas ;-)

Tools: Mainly Java, Android, REST/Web programming (JAX-RS), JSON and the like