Papers by Lucas Pereira
ABSTRACT This paper describes a novel art-inspired tangible eco-feedback system. The concept emer... more ABSTRACT This paper describes a novel art-inspired tangible eco-feedback system. The concept emerged from a workshop with researchers, designers and artists looking at innovative ways to provide more effective eco-feedback that engages users emotionally. The tangible aspect of the system is composed of a set of magnets that users can stick on their physical mailbox outside of their apartment building according to their average energy consumption. The magnets are a total of seven pieces, one for each day of the week. Each piece has a variation of three colors, from green (low consumption) to burning red (high consumption). The magnets are to be displayed in a sequence that represents a typical panorama of local nature. In this paper we report the design and the study we conducted to gauge preliminary results on the system usage and potential. Interviews with participants revealed that none of them felt uncomfortable having their consumption displayed outside. When children were involved in the process they “took control” of the task and pressured their families to perform better.
ABSTRACT This paper reports a 15 weeks study of artistic eco-feedback deployed in six houses with... more ABSTRACT This paper reports a 15 weeks study of artistic eco-feedback deployed in six houses with an innovative sensing infrastructure and visualization strategy. The paper builds on previous work that showed a significant decrease in user awareness after a short period with a relapse in consumption. In this study we aimed to investigate if new forms of feedback could overcome this issue, maintaining the users awareness for longer periods of time. The study presented here aims at understanding if people are more aware of their energy consumption after the installation of a new, art inspired eco-feedback. The research question was then: does artistic eco-feedback provide an increased awareness over normal informative feedback? And does that awareness last longer? To answer this questions participants were interviewed and their consumption patterns analyzed. The main contribution of the paper is to advance our knowledge about the effectiveness of eco-feedback and provide guidelines for implementation of novel eco-feedback visualizations that overcome the relapse behavior pattern.
This paper presents HomeTree a prototype of an art-inspired mobile ecofeedback system. The system... more This paper presents HomeTree a prototype of an art-inspired mobile ecofeedback system. The system is implemented on a tablet PC and relies on a nonintrusive energy-monitoring infrastructure to access consumption and power event information. Our prototype addresses an important problem in ecofeedback, which is the fact that users loose interest about their energy consumption after a period of several weeks. To accomplish this HomeTree implements a dual visualization strategy. Initially HomeTree presents users with a screensaver that shows energy consumption mapped in a dynamic illustration of the local forest. Through this strategy we leverage the emotional connection between the short-term energy consumption and the long-term effects on nature through the local depicted landscape. In a second mode of operation users can interact with HomeTree directly by checking the historical records of their consumption data, and check which days or weeks they have reduced or increased consumption. Furthermore a comparison with a more objective baseline, such as the city of Funchal energy consumption is provided, in order to give users a sense of the level of their consumption in a wider context.
2015 Sustainable Internet and ICT for Sustainability (SustainIT), 2015
This paper presents HomeTree a prototype of an art-inspired mobile ecofeedback system. The system... more This paper presents HomeTree a prototype of an art-inspired mobile ecofeedback system. The system is implemented on a tablet PC and relies on a nonintrusive energy-monitoring infrastructure to access consumption and power event information. Our prototype addresses an important problem in ecofeedback, which is the fact that users loose interest about their energy consumption after a period of several weeks. To accomplish this HomeTree implements a dual visualization strategy. Initially HomeTree presents users with a screensaver that shows energy consumption mapped in a dynamic illustration of the local forest. Through this strategy we leverage the emotional connection between the short-term energy consumption and the long-term effects on nature through the local depicted landscape. In a second mode of operation users can interact with HomeTree directly by checking the historical records of their consumption data, and check which days or weeks they have reduced or increased consumption. Furthermore a comparison with a more objective baseline, such as the city of Funchal energy consumption is provided, in order to give users a sense of the level of their consumption in a wider context.
ABSTRACT While interest in eco-feedback technologies has peaked over the last decade, research in... more ABSTRACT While interest in eco-feedback technologies has peaked over the last decade, research increasingly highlights that simply providing information to individuals regarding their consumption behaviors does not guarantee behavior change. This has lead to an increasing body of work that attempts to characterize individuals’ latent motivations that drive sustainable behaviors. With this paper we aim at expanding this body of work by analyzing such motivations in the context of families. We report findings from interviews with 15 families who used an eco-feedback interface over a period of 2 years. Our study reveals that motivations for sustainable behavior were not only rooted in individuals’ environmental concerns and need for expense management but they also regarded: (i) individuals’ and families’ need for a sense of control and security, (ii) parents’ self-perceived responsibility of their role as parents and (iii) the perception of individual as well as family identity. We argue that in order for eco-feedback technologies to attain long-lasting behavioral changes in the domestic environment they need to address basic family needs that go beyond individual ideals of pro-environmental behavior.
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on ICT for Sustainability
Energy and environmental sustainability can benefit a lot from advances in data mining and machin... more Energy and environmental sustainability can benefit a lot from advances in data mining and machine learning techniques. However, those advances rely on the availability of relevant datasets required to develop, improve and validate new techniques. Only recently the first datasets were made publicly available for the energy and sustainability research community. In this paper we present a freely available dataset containing power usage and related information from 50 homes. Here we describe our dataset, the hardware and software setups used when collecting the data and how others can access it. We then discuss potential uses of this data in the future of energy eco- feedback and demand side management research.
Interacting with Computers
For the last couple of decades the world has been witnessing a change in habits of energy consump... more For the last couple of decades the world has been witnessing a change in habits of energy consumption in domestic environments, with electricity emerging as the main source of energy consumed. The effects of these changes in our eco-system are hard to assess, therefore encouraging researchers from different fields to conduct studies with the goal of understanding and improving perceptions and behaviors regarding household energy consumption. While several of these studies report success in increasing awareness, most of them are limited to short periods of time, thus resulting in a reduced knowledge of how householders will behave in the long-term. In this paper we attempt to reduce this gap presenting a long-term study on household electricity consumption. We deployed a real-time non-intrusive energy monitoring and eco-feedback system in 12 families during 52 weeks. Results show an increased awareness regarding electricity consumption despite a significant decrease in interactions with the eco-feedback system over time. We conclude that after one year of deployment of eco-feedback it was not possible to see any significant increase or decrease in the household consumption. Our results also confirm that consumption is tightly coupled with independent variables like the household size and the income-level of the families.
Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is one of the most wellknown techniques used to identify and... more Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is one of the most wellknown techniques used to identify and monitor the energy consumption of individual appliances that co-exist in a building's electrical circuit. However the lack of formal methods to evaluate its performance in realistic scenarios has been delaying the emergence of commercial products. In this paper we discuss the problem and challenges of correctly accessing the performance of these systems and present our hardware-software platform for creating extensive fully labeled datasets for NILM algorithms training, testing and validation where raw electric power consumption and ground-truth consumption data are combined in audio files using the well-known wave formant. Towards the end we present our envisioned online framework for enabling the automatic evaluation of NILM algorithms under common sets of performance metrics and consumption data.
Proceedings of the 4th ACM …, Jan 1, 2012
Researchers often face engineering problems, such as optimizing prototype costs and ensuring easy... more Researchers often face engineering problems, such as optimizing prototype costs and ensuring easy access to the collected data, which are not directly related to the research problems being studied. This is especially true when dealing with long-term studies in real world scenarios. This paper describes the engineering perspective of the design, development and deployment of a long-term real word study on energy eco-feedback, where a non-intrusive home energy monitor was deployed in 30 houses for 18 months.
Proceeding Smartgreens 2011, Apr 19, 2012
This paper presents a low-cost framework for non-intrusive home energy monitoring and research bu... more This paper presents a low-cost framework for non-intrusive home energy monitoring and research built on top of Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) concepts and techniques. NILM solutions are already considered low-cost alternatives to the big majority of existing commercial energy monitors but the goal of this work is to make its cost even lower by using a mini netbook as a packaged solution. The mini netbook is installed in the home's main circuit breaker panel and computes power consumption by reading current and voltage through the built-in sound card. At the same time, feedback to the users is provided using the 11'' LCD screen as well as other built-in I/O modules. The meter is also capable of detecting changes in power consumption and tries to find out which appliance lead to that change. It is believed that such a system will not only be important as a tool for energy monitoring and feedback, but also serve as an open system that can be easily changed to accommodate and test new or existing non-intrusive load monitoring techniques.
Proceedings Persuasive 2011, Jun 2, 2011
This paper describes a low cost eco-feedback energy monitoring research platform. The prototype s... more This paper describes a low cost eco-feedback energy monitoring research platform. The prototype system developed in Java uses a netbook audio input and a single point current and voltage sensor to calculate real-time energy usage while also offering multiple visualization options and tracking human-activities. The prototype is deployed in a multidisciplinary research project to understand the long-term effects of eco-feedback and enduring behavioral changes towards practices that promote sustainability. This paper reports the efforts required to deploy the prototype system in 21 houses during a period of 9 weeks. The results enable quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of energy eco-feedback and provide a platform for further research in this domain.
m-iti.org
User-centered design, information visualization, enterprise modeling and visualization, business ... more User-centered design, information visualization, enterprise modeling and visualization, business intelligence, enterprise information systems, decision-support systems.
Conference Posters & Demos by Lucas Pereira
Persuasive Technology 2012 - Poster, Jan 1, 2012
DIS 2012 - Demo
This paper presents Eco-avatars, a tool aiming to promote long-term energy conservation behaviors... more This paper presents Eco-avatars, a tool aiming to promote long-term energy conservation behaviors across householders. It takes advantage of the emotional links that can form between humans and avatars, or personal digital personifications. The application represents each member of a household as an avatar situated in a shared graphical environment that reacts according to individual consumption activity and shows collective performance. This paper argues that playful visualizations that let users observe the impact of their consumption behaviors on a personal virtual representation, and contrast this with others in their household, will provide support and motivation for engaging in long-term sustainable behaviors.
Advances in Computer …, Jan 1, 2012
This paper presents HomeTree a prototype of an art-inspired mobile ecofeedback system. The system... more This paper presents HomeTree a prototype of an art-inspired mobile ecofeedback system. The system is implemented on a tablet PC and relies on a nonintrusive energy-monitoring infrastructure to access consumption and power event information. Our prototype addresses an important problem in ecofeedback, which is the fact that users loose interest about their energy consumption after a period of several weeks. To accomplish this HomeTree implements a dual visualization strategy. Initially HomeTree presents users with a screensaver that shows energy consumption mapped in a dynamic illustration of the local forest. Through this strategy we leverage the emotional connection between the short-term energy consumption and the long-term effects on nature through the local depicted landscape. In a second mode of operation users can interact with HomeTree directly by checking the historical records of their consumption data, and check which days or weeks they have reduced or increased consumption. Furthermore a comparison with a more objective baseline, such as the city of Funchal energy consumption is provided, in order to give users a sense of the level of their consumption in a wider context.
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Papers by Lucas Pereira
Conference Posters & Demos by Lucas Pereira