Iot on Evan King

A private ambient summarizer device

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An ePaper display shows the most common words overheard from nearby conversations.

I wrapped up my PhD recently. It’s in “Electrical and Computer Engineering”, though it’s more descriptive to say that I spent my four years of graduate school working in “Ubiquitous Computing” or ubicomp. Ubicomp researchers aim to make technology that “fit[s] the human environment” rather than forcing humans to adapt themselves to environments dominated by obtrusive technology. Established by the late Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC in the early nineties, ubicomp has philosophical roots: Weiser was strongly influenced by the idea of “entanglement”, which suggests that humans are inextricably linked to (and influenced by) their surroundings.

Teaching things to think

Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What if smart devices could reason about their state, like a thermostat that explains its schedule, or a light bulb that chooses a color to suit a mood?

That’s the subject of my IEEE PerCom ‘25 paper, “Teaching Things To Think: Bootstrapping Local Reasoning for Smart(er) Devices”. We proposed a method for synthesizing training data to distill small language models for the task, leveraging a combination of formal methods and generative models. We ultimately trained and evaluated models for two “thoughtful things” – a lamp and a thermostat – then evaluated their performance at explaining and mutating their state in response to unconstrained user commands.

Sasha: Introducing LLMs for smart spaces

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Building on my weekend project to control some smart lights with ChatGPT, this wide-ranging paper fully introduces LLM-based reasoning to multi-device smart home environments. We introduce methods and benchmarks for measuring model performance at reasoning in smart homes, propose methods for engineering immediate and scheduled responses to user goals, propose a multi-step reasoning system for improving system performance, and conduct the first user study of a real LLM-controlled smart home.

Something that often gets lost in a research paper is the truly fun and challenging experiences you can have with the work. Between touring a trailer on the UT Austin JJ Pickle Campus to see if I could turn it into a smart home (I could not – it was outfitted with extremely sensitive equipment for conducting ventilation studies) to eventually hauling pegboard and furniture from my illegally-parked RAV4 up to an unused lab on the 7th floor of the EER building, this project was truly the highlight of my PhD.

CANDor: Energy efficient neighbor discovery

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) can be useful for forming ad-hoc networks between smart devices, and for exchanging information in sensor networks. It’s difficult, however, to choose the right settings for the BLE protocols that devices use to discover one another. The optimal protocol effectively balances discovery latency and packet reception rates with the energy consumed by sending and scanning for neighboring packets.

In this work, I introduce a novel neighbor discovery protocol to improve the packet reception rate and energy consumption of BLE neighbor discovery. Unlike prior work, which uses extra sensors (e.g., GPS) to recalibrate the protocol performance, this work uses the performance of neighbor discovery itself as a signal to determine when to recalibrate the protocol’s settings.

Using LLMs to control a smart home

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

2024 UPDATE

I originally authored this post in early 2023 — little did I know it would be the spark of a broader research project, ultimately becoming a significant part of my PhD dissertation. If you are the researchy type, you can read the short 2023 preprint paper and/or the in-depth 2024 ACM IMWUT paper I published and presented at UbiComp 2024 about this topic. We also made a demo video that shows an LLM-based smart home in action. Otherwise, enjoy the original post!

Self-updating pothos timelapse camera

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A daily-updated timelapse of my pothos plant.

While I’ve cared for (and killed) a variety of different houseplants over the years, pothos plants are probably my favorite. They are incredibly hardy, easy to propogate from clippings, and they grow quickly. I’ve always been curious to learn a bit more about how these plants maneuver as they grow, so I decided to set up an automated system to monitor mine.

Combining an ESP8266 equipped with a camera, some Philips Hue smart lights, and a Raspberry Pi, this system takes a picture of the plant every hour and prepares a rolling timelapse of the past week every day at midnight. A bit of code handles exposure by balancing out the smart lights in my living room and turning on an overhead light before taking the picture. Another bit of code does some color balancing, yielding a better looking photo. ~~Each day it uploads the latest timelapse to pothos.evanking.io. The timelapse above is the latest, updated automatically.~~ UPDATE: I took this down when I moved in 2023 and haven’t had a chance to put it up again. It was a fun project though, so I’m keeping it here for archival purposes.