Wildfires have played an increasing role in wreaking havoc on communities, livelihoods, and ecosystems globally, often starting in remote regions and rapidly spreading into inhabited areas where they become difficult to suppress due to their size and unpredictability. In sparsely populated remote regions where freshly ignited fires can propagate unimpeded, the need for distributed fire detection capabilities has become increasingly urgent. In this work, we evaluate the potential of a multitude of different sensing modalities for integration into a distributed downwind fire detection system, something which does not exist today. We deployed custom sensor-rich data logging units over a multi-day-controlled burn event hosted by the Marin County Fire Department in Marin County, CA. Under the experimental conditions, nearly all sensing modalities exhibited signature behaviors of a nearby active fire, but with varying degrees of sensitivity. We present promising preliminary findings from these field tests but also note that future work is needed to assess more prosaic concerns. Larger scale trials will be needed to determine the practicality of specific sensing modalities in outdoor settings, and additional environmental data and testing will be needed to determine the sensor system lifetime, data delivery performance, and other technical considerations. Crucially, this work provides the preliminary justification underscoring that future work is potentially valuable and worth pursuit.

Despite the dominance of social networking and communications in nearly every aspect of our digital lives, little work has been done to examine the unique contributions that networked smart homes can make in the space of technologically-mediated human interaction. In this work, we introduce an application called \"ghosting\" that turns a smart and connected home into a socially-connected home. We show that unlike direct teleconferencing, the Internet of Things supports more subtle, ambient, and incidental exchanges that can make an environment feel co-inhabited by a person who may be many miles away. Ghosting synchronizes audio and lighting between two homes on a room-by-room basis. Microphones in each room transmit audio to the corresponding room in the other home, unifying the ambient sound domains of the two homes. For example, a user cooking in their kitchen transmits sounds out of speakers in the other user's own kitchen. The lighting context in corresponding rooms is also synchronized. A light toggled in one house toggles the lights in the other house in real time. We claim that this system allows for casual interactions that feel natural and intimate because they share context and require less social effort than a teleconference or phone call. We describe the design points of the system and explore the successes and limitations of the ghosting user experience by implementing and deploying a ghosting application in two different settings.

Smart and connected devices offer enormous potential to enable context-aware, localized, and multi-device orchestrations that could substantially increase the reach and utility of computing. The growth of these applications has been hampered, however, as devices, their data, and their control have been largely sequestered to their own vendor-specific APIs, clouds, and applications-a largely stove-piped state of affairs. Where barriers between devices have been pierced, the connections often occur between vendor clouds, affecting the latency, privacy, and reliability of the original application, while simultaneously increasing complexity. Locally executing applications have not materialized as devices with incompatible communication protocols, inconsistent APIs, and incongruent data models rarely communicate. We claim that what is needed to unlock the application potential is an architecture tailored to facilitating applications composed of networked devices. Our proposed architecture addresses this by providing a port-based abstraction for devices using a small wrapper layer. This device abstraction provides a consistent view of devices, and embeddable runtimes provide existing applications straightforward access to devices. The architecture also supports device discovery, shared interfaces between devices, and an application specification interface that promotes creating device-agnostic applications capable of operating even when devices change. We demonstrate the efficacy of our architecture with two application case studies that highlight the abstraction layers between applications and devices and employ the embeddability of our system to add new functionality to existing systems.