Manav Jaiswal M.S. ’16 and computer engineering advisors Nam Ling and Yuhong Liu received the Best Paper Award for “Design and Implementation of a Greener Home Automation System” at the Ninth IEEE International Conference on Ubi-media Computing.

While studying the Internet of Things (IoT) as a computer engineering master’s student, Jaiswal wondered if he could create a system to not only save power but also change users’ behavior. He writes: “The idea was inspired by a bachelor’s project I did in India. In my town, our power would be cut off for hours at a time. The technology of IoT was not yet available in 2013–14, so my family used batteries and inverters and relied on solar appliances when power was not available. I wanted to find a way to use less power so it would be available for future use.”

The paper describes the design and implementation of an intelligent framework in IoT that can handle tasks of thermostat and humidity control similar to other products currently on the market for about $250, but can also do much more for less.