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Neural Networks In The Home?
Hougaard asks: "I'm investigating the use of neural networks in homes for a architectual project. Do you have a neural network that controls the light or the temperature in your home? Do you want one? What other features would you like to have in a real intelligent home? How should you learn and train the network? A remote with a 'Good' and 'Bad' buttons or something completly different? The only real life example I have found is the use of neural networks in elevators to predict elevator traffic. Yes I know that Cisco and others have the 'Internet House' - but that is just a home with a network - not really a revolution - and not very intelligent."
There are two problems with this discussion, one is wonderful. I'm making an attempt to identify them in the hopes that one or two more people might post intelligently and inspire some good ideas and responses.
The first problem is wonderful. The question that's been posed to us is vague, perhaps purposefully vague. It talks of "neural networks" without a stated problem. Is Hougaard looking for a way to run his heat and air conditioning? Does he want lights to automatically do what he'd like them to do? Does he want his house to predict what kind of music he'd likely enjoy at a certain point, and play it? This lack of definition seems to have stumped most respondants.
The second problem is a lack of informed, creative response. This is slashdot, a place where people like to think they have a better grasp on technology and it's implications than the rest of the world. This discussion is proving that it isn't so. Where's the creativity? Why are there posts which don't seem to indicate any hint of knowledge about how neural networks work?
I think this is a wonderful, amazing idea. Imagine if you will, starting small. Take one thing, for the first item, I'll pick air conditioning and heat. The system is set up such that in each room, there's a method of indicating if it is too hot, or too cold. The system could contain a clock, a basic weather station with access to humidity, temperature, wind speed and direction.
After a little bit, one could have a system which knows that if the wind has kicked up from the south, then the master bedroom starts to feel a little bit cold, but the rest of the house will be the same as usual. It will know that you tend to watch TV in the family room, which isn't over a basement, and thus gets a cold floor when the temperature has been below 50 for more than a few days. These are the kind of optimizations that would take forever to program into standard logic.
As a more interesting, harder to get right example, music. Let's say you have a centralized database of music, with automated access to your CD players, your mp3 database, and Music Choice on your satellite TV. That part's easy, I've got that. I also categorized all my music, no matter what the format is, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. After all, it's a hell of a lot easier to buy a stack of 200 CD changers, and write some software to control them, than it is to remember where it was you decided to file that Negativland cd, or that orchestral recording with Brahms and Rachmaninov on the same CD.
Now all we do is modify that software, to help the neural network understand what it is we're likely to want to hear at any given time. If I've been sitting at my unix box working (detectable by the state of xscreensaver), then I'm probably coding. Because I've manually picked the same genre of music every other time I've been activating these neurons, it puts on the new Dark Soho album, and I find myself listening to some slammin' trance. If it guessed wrong, well I just go to the standard music interface, tell it 'no, i wanted to listen to that midfield general ep i finally picked up' and eventually it figures out 'hey, this guy overrides his standard preferences, for stuff that's new to my database.' It might not get it right every time, but it'll likely be a hell of a lot better than what I'd get if I just put the player on random.
Surely somebody in this crowd of self-proclaimed geeks and cutting-edge thought, can realize the potential of this, and open your mind to the possibilities of a system like this. Possibilities like incredible profit. Ludicrously incredible profit.
Stop whining about what isn't possible, and think about what is! It's the 21st century, and if I can't have a rocket pack and a flying car, I want a house that plays dope tracks, automatically.
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"Don't trolls get tired?"
Combining them is interesting but first you've got to find someone who has a "Smart House" then discover if they use "Neural Nets" in any way. Even on /. the number of folks who live in full-blown (or even partial) smart homes is incredibly small and with that small sample the odds of finding someone using neural nets is even more remote.
Consider posting on home.automation newsgroups, dedicated websites, and mailing-lists. There at least you'll have reached the first criteria of your study and can begin looking for the second.
I also wonder why neural nets would make any difference? Are you interested in systems that can 'learn' from an occupant? Are you looking to compare 'nets to other more traditional systems using sensors & statistics? Comparing different types of 'nets against each-other? Identifying learning-curves, ability to respond to differing situations, appropriateness of responses? How could one even evaluate "success" or "accuracy" against other automation systems? (Yes I know there are methods even for very fuzzy stuff like this but I can't imagine a sample-set out there being large enough to be meaningful.)
Not to be disparaging but unless your posting has been edited-to-idiocy it appears overly broad & extremely vague. Indeed what applicability any of this has to architecture escapes me. Systems Engineering, Electro-Mechanical Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Human Interfaces: Yes but all of these are the provenance of specialists, not Architects (at least amongst the architectural curriculum I'm aware of.)
Or is this simply combining two hot buzzwords in a way to create a research project out of thin air?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
This would make it great for pranks; sneak into someone's house and then train the network to play the theme from Psycho whenever someone takes a shower...
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Neural nets usually work well in areas where conventional binary logic fails. Text, image and speech recognition are examples.
A neural net in your home would, in my opinion, be too complex to bother with. Neural nets are self programmed through experience to perform choices that aren't easy to define in computer code.
For example, some time ago there was this slasdot post about a program which supposedly recognizes "innapropriate" images (i.e., porn). It can be used in web proxies, for example. The program didn't perform very well (in my opinion, it failed miserably, as the task is extremely difficult).
A very complex neural net could theoretically learn from experience to recognize the difference between a naked baby and two people having sex. You can't program such a net by hand because there are so many neurons involved and influencing other neurons in ways so complex you can't even imagine.
Now why would you want to use that to switch/dim lights in a house? The net could learn your behavior through experience at first, for example. It could have this "learn mode", much like smart network switches do. The net itself would be useless at this point, and it would record what you do at particular times of the day and perhaps make notes on your moods and act accordingly. After this learning period it would do things on itself and be corrected if the choice was incorrect. But hey, I really don't think you need the black magic that neurons give you to notice that.
The bottom line is that people are usually very predictable. Neural nets are great when nuances from an objective POV are fundamental (like position/density of beige colors in an image as an indicator of porn) and this doesn't seem to be the case.
Flavio
I want one that uses a pnumatic ram to toss salesmen off my property, after they ignore the 8"x11" NO SOLICITING THIS MEANS YOU sign.
One that can sense when I bring a visitor home and clean up real quick.
One that uses a deep booming voice to say "THAT SCUM IS SCAMMING YOU!" when the A/C repairman says my unit will colapse into dust in four seconds, posining my family and pets.
I want one that will project a hologram of Satan when Jehova's witnesses come around, or one of an avenging angel when satanist's come knocking.
One that will order booze when I'm low and send the bill to M$.
One with a radio control unit built in to mow the lawn.
Scans my e-mail and ZOT's spammers, then delete the e-mail.
Seriously, I don't know the relm of possibility with neural-networks. Haven't looked at 'em, don't know what's possible and what isn't. Guess I need to start looking around for info....
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.