scholarly journals A Safe Collaborative Chatbot for Smart Home Assistants

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (19) ◽  
pp. 6641
Author(s):  
Merav Chkroun ◽  
Amos Azaria
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Smart Home ◽  
End Users ◽  
Home Appliances ◽  
Large Community ◽  
Political Views

Smart home assistants, which enable users to control home appliances and can be used for holding entertaining conversations, have become an inseparable part of many people’s homes. Recently, there have been many attempts to allow end-users to teach a home assistant new commands, responses, and rules, which can then be shared with a larger community. However, allowing end-users to teach an agent new responses, which are shared with a large community, opens the gate to malicious users, who can teach the agent inappropriate responses in order to promote their own business, products, or political views. In this paper, we present a platform that enables users to collaboratively teach a smart home assistant (or chatbot) responses using natural language. We present a method of collectively detecting malicious users and using the commands taught by the malicious users to further mitigate activity of future malicious users. We ran an experiment with 192 subjects and show the effectiveness of our platform.

scholarly journals A smart home embedded computer system on programmable chips

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan B. Chan
Keyword(s):  
Embedded System ◽  
Computer System ◽  
Smart Home ◽  
Data Transfer ◽  
Cold Water ◽  
System Development ◽  
Cost Savings ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Development Environment ◽  
Home Appliances

System on Programmable Chip (SoPC) based embedded system development has been increasing, aiming for improved system design, testing, and cost savings in the workflow for Application Specific ICs (ASIC). We examine the development of Smart Home embedded systems, which have been traditionally based on a fixed processor and memory, with inflexible configuration. We investigate how more ability can be added by updating firmware without the burden of updating hardware, or using a full (but dedicated) general purpose computer system. Our development and implementation of the smart home controller is based on the SoPC development environment from Altera. The development board includes all the necessary parts such as processor, memory, and various communication interfaces. The initial implementation includes a simple protocol for communication between home appliances or devices and controller. This protocol allows data transfer between home appliances or devices and the controller, in turn allowing both to support more features. We have investigated and developed a home resource management application. The main resources being managed in this project are hot and cold water, electricity, and gas. We have introduced a number of expert rules to manage these resources. Additionally, we have developed a home simulator, with virtual appliances and devices, that communicates with the home controller. The simulator interacts with the SoPC based smart home embedded system developed in this project by generating messages representing a number of smart appliances in the home. It provides a useful testing environment for the smart home embedded system to verify its design goals.

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