Conversation-Based Complex Event Management in Smart-Spaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces Jarvis, a conversational assistant for smart spaces that combines ease of use with complex management capabilities, supporting causality queries and integration with existing interfaces.

Contribution

The paper presents Jarvis, a novel conversational assistant that merges simple voice commands with complex event management and causal reasoning in smart spaces.

Findings

Jarvis supports intuitive commands for managing smart devices.

It enables causality queries to explain system behaviors.

Easily integrates with existing user interfaces.

Abstract

Smart space management can be done in many ways. On one hand, there are conversational assistants such as the Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa that enable users to comfortably interact with smart spaces with only their voice, but these have limited functionality and are usually limited to simple commands. On the other hand, there are visual interfaces such as IBM's Node-RED that enable complex features and dependencies between different devices. However, these are limited since they require users to have a technical knowledge of how the smart devices work and the system's interface is more complicated and harder to use since they require a computer. This project proposes a new conversational assistant - Jarvis - that combines the ease of use of current assistants with the operational complexity of the visual platforms. The goal of Jarvis is to make it easier to manage smart spaces by providing intuitive commands and useful features. Jarvis integrates with already existing user interfaces such as the Google Assistant, Slack or Facebook Messenger, making it very easy to integrate with existing systems. Jarvis also provides an innovative feature - causality queries - that enable users to ask it why something happened. For example, a user can ask "why did the light turn on?" to understand how the system works.