Today’s “smart home” technology has been cooking for quite a while. We were working on it back before the turn of the century.
There are plenty of challenging problems, but one of the most difficult is what we called “semantic interoperability” [2].
Or, as Julie Jammot puts it, “The oven won’t talk to the fridge” [1].
This was a completely predictable problem, and we thought hard about it as we were booting up the first tries at “smart rooms”. Our academic solution, circa 2003, was deep and elegant: using semantic web technology and AI to reason about “ontologies” describing devices (e.g., [2-4], TLDR). (FWIW, this is an elegant solution because the reasoning can involve anything, including everything in the environment, including people, tasks, and policies, etc..)
The problem with deep and elegant solutions, especially when they are 10 years ahead of their time, is that no one knows or cares how cool they are. Eventually, companies deploy their stuff, and pretty soon they rediscover the problems we thought about, and reinvent solutions, usually nowhere near as deep and elegant.
That’s the academic research biz. We’re used to it. It’s called “a purely academic solution”. Sigh.
Anyway, companies have been deploying so-called “smart home” stuff for years now, and—surprise!—users are discovering interoperability problems.
Solution number one was to try to grab a monopoly. Everything works great as long as you only use Amazon, or Google, or Apple or Samsun or…. In this case, world domination was not achieved.
Solution number two was to create an interoperability standard so other companies can talk to your hub. As we joked back in the 80s (and it was an old joke then), “We love standards. That’s why we have so many of them.” This is basically an effort for world domination by other means, and it failed. We have many “standards”, and nobody uses them.
So, by now, perhaps in desperation, solution number three is to create a real, neutral standard, and get everybody on board.
The new standard is called “Matter”, and is supported by Connectivity Standards Alliance and has been implemented by all the major companies. IEEE Spectrum reports that Matter was well represented at CES this year [5]. There has been lots of favorable chatter in the blogosphere. This could work.
Glancing at what Matter is, we see that it’s not particularly new. There have been similar standards before. The big new thing is the buy-in from multiple companies, and the commitment to neutrality.
What it does is pretty much the same as what our stuff did circa 1999. I mean, this isn’t really that tricky. Conceptually, there is a flexible notion of common types of device (e.g., “lightbulb” or “thermostat”), with an abstract interface that can wrap specific instances. This is implemented by a pretty simple “hub” which is basically a translator unit.
How does this compare to our deep and elegant and literally academic ,solution? Basically, we were talking about one more level of abstraction, working with metadata descriptions of abstract and specific devices. The API essentially interpreted these descriptions rather than hard coded them. Using semantic web stuff meant that we could reason about the descriptions, to work out that this thing should be treated like a “thermostat” or a “lightbulb” or whatever, and then load the code for that type of device.
This approach meant that we could load totally new classes of device on the fly, which I’m pretty sure Matter can’t. We also could deal with messy cases, such as a “smart lightbulb” that is also a “smart thermostat”.
So, is Matter really any good?
It’s not deep and elegant like our stuff was. But it has the right sociotechnical oomph to become ubiquitous. And ubiquitous is literally the name of the game (we named it “ubiquitous computing” for a reason).
So, yeah. Deployment is certainly nine tenths of the law in this case. (Reliability and security are the last tenth, and we’ll have to see how Matter really works.)
If Matter succeeds, we can slip more elegant solutions in the back door. I can easily imagine a fancy AI system that essentially generates Matter code and protocol as one of its options. Elegant and deep and ubiquitous.
So—well done, Matter. Well…done well enough to solve the problem for now.
- Julie Jammot, The oven won’t talk to the fridge: ‘smart’ homes struggle, in Agence France-Presse, January 6, 2023. https://www.yahoo.com/now/oven-wont-talk-fridge-smart-172031064.html
- Robert E. McGrath.”Semantic Infrastructure for a Ubiquitous Computing Environment.” Ph. D. Dissertation, Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/11057
- Robert E. McGrath, Anand Ranganathan, Roy H. Campbell, and M. Dennis Mickunas, Incorporating “Semantic Discovery” into Ubiquitous Computing Environments, in Ubisys 2003. 2003: Seattle.
- Robert E. McGrath, Anand Ranganathan, M. Dennis Mickunas, and Roy H. Campbell, Investigations of Semantic Interoperability in Ubiquitous Computing Environments, in International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems. 2003: Marina Del Rey.
- Matthew S. Smith, The Best Tech of CES 2023, in IEEE Spectrum – Consumer Electronics, January 9, 2023. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ces-2023-best-tech
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