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Home Networks

As technology progresses to smaller and more powerful devices, there is now a movement towards pushing it into the home. This is the concept of a smart home powered by the internet of things. Putting a humidity sensor next to your window and technology can instantly give you an idea of how moist your room is and allow you to change it with its connection to a humidifier. An even better example would be letting you check instantly to see if your garage is closed while you are from work, and if not, let you close it from miles away. While many different companies will only support proprietary software, SmartThings is open and will support integration with as many different extensions as possible. This makes it a really interesting possibility to be a hub where users can check the status of their homes instantly and conveniently. In addition, SmartThings has an advanced setting with macros where a user can micromanage certain behaviors of their homes. For example, one can program their hub to close the garage door automatically when the motion sensor has detected that the car has stopped moving.

Because the home powered by the internet of things is essentially a giant graph containing nodes of appliances and edges for interactions, we can very easily visualize the home as a network. Each separate node has its own purpose in the network and there exists a central node, the hub, that has numerous connections to other nodes. When a signal is sent from the humidity sensor, it has to first travel along an edge to get to the central hub before the hub analyzes the data and send the “on” command to the humidifier. Without an edge, the information cannot travel, which is very similar to how a social network works as well. A friend can see what another friend has posted, but not what a stranger has posted. The graph will not be complete, however, as all of the external nodes only maintain a single connection to the central node, the hub, and does not have connections or edges between each other. In addition, non of the nodes will satisfy the Strong Triadic Closure Principle as there would always only exists a single connection from an outer node to the central hub. There would be no positive or negative edges as the undirected graph would simply dictate that information can travel, and not the effects of that transaction. It would still be interested to see the existing interactions though.

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/smartthings-desperately-wants-turn-houses-smart-homes/

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