HCC-Medium: StepGreen: Mobilizing Social Networks and Context Awareness to Motivate Reduced Energy

2005年，美国人消耗了100万亿BTU的能源，几乎是世界平均水平的6倍。这些能源消耗中的很大一部分直接与个人活动有关，如照明、供暖和制冷。通过对这些日常活动进行简单的修改，个人可以节省能源并帮助减少二氧化碳排放总量。该项目利用互联网技术来开发一种可扩展的方法来改变有关环境足迹(支持个人或家庭所需的自然资源量或排放量)的行为。其目的是使用在线社交网络、手机和其他技术来提供一套生态无害、上下文敏感的行为建议。最终目标是通过对推动变化的成功方法的行为研究、环境影响分析以及支持客观测量和上下文相关通信的无处不在的计算，实现互联网规模的能源行为变化。该项目将利用现有的StepGreen.org网站作为三项核心活动的试验台。首先，将进行受控实地研究，以考察个性化的价值和社会对改变动机的影响，以及动机策略如何适应种族和文化群体的差异。其次，将开发廉价的传感技术，可以不引人注目地提取有关日常行为变化的信息。例如，这将能够通过对电费和汽油购买等交易的简单财务监控来跟踪家庭供暖、制冷和交通行为。最后，StepGreen部署作为一种大规模的社会干预，必须灵活地适应关于人的背景信息(例如，受欢迎的通信方式、适当的时机)。拟议工作的多学科性质使几个科学领域的创新成为可能。通过将技术创新和社会科学结合在一起，这项拟议的工作可以在该领域测试社会计算理论，提供对在线社交网络与行为干预策略相结合的如何导致广泛行为变化的详细理解。同时，为UbiComp技术的大规模分布式测评探索和创新解决方案。通过将环境科学和机器学习结合在一起，研究人员将创建第一个客观的个人能源使用量计算器。最后，这项研究将通过识别对行为和能源消耗之间的关系的误解，教育广大民众他们可以采取的个人行动来减少他们的消耗，并在理想情况下实现美国能源消耗的减少，从而有利于环境决策。这项拟议的研究将通过对研究生和本科生进行跨学科培训，以及作为卡内基-梅隆绿色设计学徒计划的一部分，通过高中推广，使教育受益。S的作品聚焦于不同的社会经济群体将有助于突出解决设计和行为科学中跨文化问题的重要性。最后，该项目将帮助解决一个关键的社会问题，并提供成果，为社会利益取决于个人行为改变的其他领域提供信息(例如，健康、乱扔垃圾、社区行动)，从而使社会受益。

In 2005, Americans consumed 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy, or almost six times the world wide average per person. Much of this energy consumption is directly related to personal, individual activities such as lighting, heating and cooling. By making simple modifications to these routine activities individuals can conserve energy and help reduce total CO2 emissions. This project leverages Internet technologies to develop a scalable approach to changing behavior regarding environmental footprint (the amount of natural resources or emissions required to support an individual or household). The intent is to use online social networks, cell phones and other technologies to provide a set of ecologically sound, context-sensitive behavioral recommendations. The ultimate goal is to achieve Internet-scale energy behavior change via behavioral research on successful ways to motivate change, environmental impact analysis, and ubiquitous computing that supports objective measurement and context-sensitive communication. The project will use the existing StepGreen.org website as a testbed for three core activities. First, controlled field studies will be conducted to examine the value of personalization and social influence on motivation to change as well as how motivational strategies can accommodate differences among ethnic and cultural groups. Second, inexpensive sensing techniques will be developed that can unobtrusively extract information about changes in daily behaviors. For example, this will be able to track home heating, cooling and transportation behavior through simple financial monitoring of transactions such as electricity bills and gasoline purchases. Finally, the StepGreen deployment, as a large-scale social intervention, must adapt flexibly to contextual information about people (e.g., favored communication modalities, appropriate timing). The multidisciplinary nature of the proposed work enables innovative changes in several scientific domains. By bringing together technical innovation and social science, the proposed work can test theories of social computing in the field, providing a detailed understanding of how online social networks in combination with behavioral intervention strategies can lead to widespread behavioral change. Simultaneously, this work will explore and innovate solutions for large-scale distributed evaluation of Ubicomp technology. By bringing together environmental science and machine learning, the investigators will create the first objective calculator of individual energy use. Finally, the research will benefit environmental decision making by identifying misconceptions about relationships between behavior and energy consumption, educating a broad populace on individual actions they can take to reduce their consumption, and, ideally, achieving reductions in U.S. energy use.Broader impacts. The proposed research will benefit education through the interdisciplinary training of graduate and undergraduate students and through high school outreach as part of Carnegie-Mellon's Green Design Apprenticeship. The work?s focus on different socioeconomic groups will help to highlight the importance of addressing cross-cultural issues in design and behavioral science. Finally, the project will benefit society by helping to address a critical social issue and by providing results that inform other domains in which societal benefits depend on individual behavior change (e.g., health, littering, community action).