Home, SafeHome: Manage the Smart Home, Not the Devices!

Abstract

The burgeoning of IoT devices is quickly making our smart homes complex to manage. While major vendors provide abstractions called "routines", concurrency and device failures still cause inconsistent outcomes and unsafe states. We describe SafeHome, a system that provides notions of atomicity, serial equivalence, and safety, for routines running in smart homes. SafeHome is the first step towards enabling users to manage their lives rather than managing individual devices. We also describe (time permitting) follow-up work with HCI user studies. This exciting direction marries ideas from multiple areas: distributed systems, HCI, databases, and others.

Bio

Indranil Gupta (Indy) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works on Distributed Systems + X, ranging from algorithms to design and implementation to production systems, across multiple areas of cloud/cluster computing, Edge, IoT, ML systems, and with collaborations in (X = ) verification, ML, HCI, etc. His work has won multiple Best Paper awards. Indy has worked at Google, IBM Research, and Microsoft Research. He has participated in multiple industry production systems, and his work has been adopted by companies small to large. Indy's popular podcast featuring interviews, called "Immigrant Computer Scientists," is available free: http://csimmigrant.org/