Hivemind: social control-and-use of IoT towards democratization of public spaces

Abstract

Public spaces are equipped with 'public actuators', e.g., HVAC, lighting fixtures, speakers, or streaming TV channels to ensure their visitors' comfort. However, many public actuators rarely allow the visitors to adjust their operation, limiting their utility and fairness across the visitors. Also, the social bar is often too high to speak up one's preference and attempt to change an actuator's operation. Social control and use of IoT devices is an underexplored new direction of research even with its huge potential and implication, but comes with high complexity and scale. This paper proposes a novel architecture, namely, Social Control-and-Use Architecture for IoT Devices, which provides a systematic view and an effective tool to handle the complication and intricacy in system design. It also proposes Hivemind, a first-of-a-kind system developed, upon the architecture, for sharing IoT-enabled actuators in a public space. It transforms an exclusively-controlled actuator in a public space into a true public actuator, supporting visitors to instantly participate in the democratic collective control. Also, a myriad of off-the-shelf actuators are easily incorporated without modification to their implementation. The field deployment of Hivemind shows its comprehensive service coverage as well as the users' approval on the democratic collective control of public actuators.