Naturally ventilated offices enable users to control their environment through the opening of windows.Whilst this level of control is welcomed by users it creates risk in terms of energy performance, especially during the heating season. In older office buildings, facilities managers usually obtain energy information at the building level. They are often unaware or unable to respond to non-ideal facade interaction by users often as a result of poor environmental control provision. In the summer months, this may mean poor use of free cooling opportunities, whereas in the winter, space heating may be wasteful. This paper describes a low cost, camera based system to automatically diagnose the status of each window (open or closed) in a facade.The system is shown to achieve a window status prediction accuracy level of 90%-97% across both winter and summer test periods in a case study building. A number of limitations are discussed including winter daylight hours, impact of rain and the use of fixed camera locations and how these may be addressed.Options to use this window opening information to engage with office users are explored.

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Computer vision and pattern recognition are increasingly being employed by smartphone and tablet applications targeted at lay-users. An open design challenge is to make such systems intelligible without requiring users to become technical experts. This paper reports a lab study examining the role of visual feedback. Our fndings indicate that the stage of processing from which feedback is derived plays an important role in users' ability to develop coherent and correct understandings of a system's operation. Participants in our study showed a tendency to misunderstand the meaning being conveyed by the feedback, relating it to processing outcomes and higher level concepts, when in reality the feedback represented low level features. Drawing on the experimental results and the qualitative data collected, we discuss the challenges of designing interactions around pattern matching algorithms.

The availability of low-power Wi-Fi radio modules opens up opportunities to leverage the existing prevalent Wi-Fi infrastructure for large-scale trials and deployments of Ubicomp technology. In this paper we address the challenge of supporting end-users, especially when they are not technical experts, in connecting new low-power, low-cost Wi-Fi devices with very minimal UIs to an existing, secure Wi-Fi infrastructure. We report two usability studies through which 30 participants, with no formal technical training, compared 4 alternative configuration techniques, selected based on cost and consumption constraints, and on adoption in off-the-shelf products. Through an analysis of success rate and causes of failure, our results indicate that two techniques are noticeably more usable than others. These are a web-based configuration mechanism, where users connect to an access point on the Wi-Fi device, and one that makes use of a standard audio cable to connect a smartphone to the device to be configured.