7 Oct 13:00 Giulio Jacucci: BeAware - Turning Consumers into Active Players in Energy Conservation

Please join us for Prof. Giulio Jacucci who will talk about raising consumers' energy awareness.

Time: Wednesday 7 October at 1-2pm.

Place: Spektri's 3rd floor meeting room.

Title: BeAware - Turning Consumers into Active Players in Energy Conservation

Abstract:
One of the most effective ways for being more energy efficient is to motivate and empower citizens to become active in conservation. We present Energy Life an system that can offer the opportunity to raise awareness of their own power consumption in real time. Energy Life is based on capillary wireless sensing of consumption and provides an engaging application on mobile and ambient interfaces such as home lighting helping to:
* Monitor and learn about consumption understanding the effects of different choices
* Share consumption practices in groups and communities – this creates opportunities for learning better practices or incentives for adopting virtuous behaviours The technology developed in the project will be set up in two different pilot si tes – one Nordic (Sweden/Finland) and one Southern European (Italy). In each site, studies will be carried in a home environment.

Bio:
Giulio Jacucci, Professor, PhD, is Professor at the University of Art and Design Helsinki and co-leads Ubiquitous Interaction a research group at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (Helsinki University of Technology). He has a background in engineering and information systems (MSc Eng from Politecnico di Milano) , has received a PhD from the University of Oulu and has visited previously the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Darmstadt and the Vienna University of Technology. He participates in organising and in program committees of several conferences in the area of human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing. Jacucci has won funding for several EU projects he is currently coordinator of BeAware a FP7 EU ICT project involving 8 international partners (www.energyawareness.eu). He is also co-founder and chairman of the board of MultiTouch Ltd. a company commercialising solutions for scalable multitouch screens.