Informing Energy Choices Using Ubiquitous Sensing

毫无疑问，我们必须减少温室气体排放，以避免灾难性的气候变化。然而，人类活动与能源和碳外部性的影响之间存在脱节。通过监测特定人类活动的能源使用情况，UbiComp技术可能会帮助我们发现这种隐藏的影响。我们的目标是将计算机科学、经济学、碳特征分析和社会学结合在一起，探索识别并告知人们“日常活动中有碳影响的关键时刻”的可行性，这样他们就可以单独和共同节省开支。我们将使用一套新颖的技术和文化探测器与实际社区合作，涉及嵌入式传感器、智能手机应用程序、聚合的“众包”数据和人种学实地工作，以更丰富地理解导致低碳生活方式的行为，并以实验数据为后盾，这些数据表明了我们的干预措施将这些影响反馈给最终用户的影响。我们的软件、高级结果、算法和模型将被置于公共领域，并通过我们的参与计划进行交流，例如与当地学校开发教材。我们的假设是，人们没有意识到他们直接和间接的能源使用及其相关的气候变化影响：这是理解如何实现个人的低碳生活的障碍，作为社区。在为期两年的可行性研究中，我们的目标是：1.收集关于能源使用和相关的碳足迹的个人归因的基线数据；2.开发财务和环境权衡的实时模型，以确定节约的机会；3.将节省的机会传回给个人，使人们能够更好地意识到家庭“能源相关实验”的影响；4.提供方法来比较个人社交网络中的使用情况和其他人的使用情况；i)作为一种激励；以及ii)提高人们对集体行动的低成本机会(如拼车)的认识；5.创建在线资源和教材，将我们的发现传达给研究小组以外的更广泛的人群。我们已经与加洛韦碳行动计划(一个有2800人的社区)建立了联系，他们承诺支持我们并进入参与的三个社区。这是收集来自最终用户的真实世界数据和调查结果的完美补充，也是传达我们的调查结果并产生重大现实影响的完美补充。我们还与当地学校建立了联系，这些学校准备帮助我们开发教材，帮助我们将关键课程传达给当地社区。

There is little doubt we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change. There is however, a disconnect between human activities and impact in energy and carbon externality. By monitoring energy use for a specific human activity, Ubicomp technologies may help us uncover this hidden impact. Our aim is to bring Computer Science, Economics, Carbon Profiling and Sociology together to explore the feasibility of identifying and informing people of 'critical moments in their daily activities that have carbon impact', so they can individually and collectively make savings. We will work with an actual community using a novel set of technological and cultural probes, involving embedded sensors, smartphone applications, aggregated 'crowdsourced' data and ethnographic field work, to deliver a richer understanding of behaviour that leads to lower carbon lifestyles, backed up by experimental data showing the impact of our intervention feeding this back to end-users. Our software, high level results, algorithms and models will be placed into the public domain and communicated through our programme of engagement, such as developing teaching materials with local schools.Our hypothesis is people are unaware of their direct and indirect energy usage and its associated climate change impact: this is a barrier to understanding how to achieve 'low carbon living' personally, as communities. During a 2 year feasibility study our objectives are to:1. Gather baseline data about energy use and associated carbon footprint that is personally attributable;2. Develop real-time models of financial and environmental tradeoffs for identifing opportunities for savings;3. Communicate opportunities for making savings back to individuals, enabling greater awareness and making it easy to chart the effect of household 'energy related experiments';4. Provide methods for comparing the usage against others in one's social network i) as an incentive, and ii) to raise awareness of low cost opportunities for collective action (such as ride-sharing);5. Create online resources and teaching materials to communicate our findings to a wider population beyond the study group.We have established links with Galloway Carbon Action Project (a community of 2,800) homes who have pledged us support and access to the three communities involved. This is a perfect complement for gathering real world data and findings from end-users and for communicating our findings and having a significant real-world impact. We also have links with local schools who are prepared to help us develop teaching materials, to help us communicate the key lessons to local communities.