Control software for home automation, design aspects and position paper

The home is an eternal, heterogeneous, distributed computing environment which must be secure and reliable. Computers and embedded processors in the home are all different shapes and sizes and ages. Hence the home poses one of the most challenging environments for co-operative programming. We envisage that control software is introduced into the home by four different methods varying from embedded ROM code to applets generated from a combination of natural language and gesture with wands. But we argue that, in the long term, all of it must be represented in a common, formally-verifiable language and conform to a common scripting convention. The AutoHan project at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory is the umbrella under which we are trying to grow these ideas.