Robert Stephen Brewer

Tableau Software

Encouraging sustainable living by raising awareness of resource consumption has long been a topic within HCI. However, getting people to change behavior when it comes to energy consumption is difficult. This is one of the major challenges ahead for future energy systems, in particular if resources are renewable and plentiful. We developed the Clock...

Sustainability education and conservation have become an international imperative due to the rising cost of energy, increasing scarcity of natural resource and irresponsible environmental practices. This paper presents Makahiki, an open source serious game framework for sustainability, which implements an extensible framework for different organiza...

Demand response can be applied in a smart grid scenario to promote renewable energy integration by regulating the electricity consumption to match the available renewable production. Buildings are relevant demand response sources for consuming significant amounts of electricity. This paper presents Green Lift, an intervention that explores the dema...

Domain experts dealing with big data are typically not familiar with advanced data mining tools. This especially holds true for domain experts within energy management. In this paper, we introduce a visual analytics approach that empowers such users to visually analyze energy behavior based on consumption meters, sensors and user reported survey da...

Modern electrical grids are increasingly reliant on generation from renewable sources that can vary from hour to hour. This variability has led to the desire to shift the times of the day when electricity is consumed to better match generation. One way to achieve these shifts is by encouraging people to change their behavior at home. Leveraging pri...

Increased renewable electricity production, coupled with emerging sectors of electricity consumption such as electric vehicles, has led to the desire to shift the times of the day electricity is consumed to better match generation. Different methods have been proposed to shift residential electricity use from the less desirable times to more desira...

Addressing human impact on the environment by focusing on shared everyday practices, rather than just individual behavior is an approach that shows promise. However, it can be challenging to put this approach into concrete use, especially in teams unfamiliar with the practice orientation. To support the practice approach, we introduce the Contextua...

Assessment of serious game frameworks is emerging as an important area of research. This paper describes an assessment mechanism called the Serious Game Stakeholder Experience Assessment Method (SGSEAM). SGSEAM is designed to provide detailed insights into the strengths and shortcomings of serious game frameworks through a stakeholder perspective b...

The Kukui Cup project investigates the use of "meaningful play" to facilitate energy aware-ness, conservation and behavioral change. Each Kukui Cup Challenge combines real world and online environments in an attempt to combine information technology, game mechanics, educational pedagogy, and incentives in a synergistic and engaging fashion. We chal...

The authors currently engaged in two projects to improve human-computer interaction (HCI) designs that can help conserve resources. The projects explore motivation and persuasion strategies relevant to ubiquitous computing systems that bring realtime consumption data into the homes and hands of residents in Brisbane, Australia. The first project se...

The Kukui Cup is an advanced dorm energy competition whose goal is to investigate the relationships among energy literacy, sustained energy conservation, and information technology support of behavior change. Two general purpose open source systems have been implemented: WattDepot and Makahiki. WattDepot provides enterprise-level collection, storag...

WattDepot is an open source, Internet-based, service-oriented framework for collection, storage, analysis, and visualization of energy data. WattDepot differs from other energy management solutions in one or more of the following ways: it is not tied to any specific metering technology; it provides high-level support for meter aggregation and data...

SocialSense is a system designed to provide additional social information about nearby people. SocialSense detects Bluetooth devices and uses them to infer the presence of particular people, pulling their profiles and status from online social networking sites. SocialSense differs from existing mobile social awareness systems by integrating live fe...

Project LEAP (lightweight, empirical, antimeasurement dysfunction, and portable toolkit) is investigating tools and methods to support low-cost, empirically based software developer improvement. LEAP contains tools to simplify the collection of size and effort data. The collected data serves as input to a set of estimation tools. These tools can pr...

Searching the archives of electronic product support mailing lists often provides unsatisfactory results for users looking for quick solutions to their problems. Archives are inconvenient because they are too voluminous, lack efficient searching mechanisms, and retain the original thread structure which is not relevant to knowledge seekers. I prese...

Developers often use electronic mailing lists when seeking assistance with a particular software application. The archives of these mailing lists provide a rich repository of problem-solving knowledge. Developers seeking a quick answer to a problem find these archives inconvenient, because they lack efficient searching mechanisms, and retain the st...

Developers often use electronic mailing lists when seeking assistance with a particular software application. The archives of these mailing lists provide a rich repository of problem-solving knowledge. Developers seeking a quick answer to a problem find these archives inconvenient, because they lack efficient searching mechanisms, and retain the st...

Usenet is an example of the potential and problems of the nascent National Information Infrastructure. While Usenet makes an enormous amount of useful information available to its users, the daily data overwhelms any user who tries to read more than a fraction of it. This paper presents a collaboration-oriented approach to knowledge management and...

Formal technical review (FTR) is a cornerstone of software quality assurance. However, the labor-intensive and manual nature of review, along with basic unresolved questions about its process and products, means that review is typically under-utilized or inefficiently applied within the software development process. This paper discusses our initial...

The Personal Environmental Tracker (PET) is a proposed system for helping people to track their impact on the environment, and to make changes to reduce that impact, creating a personal feedback loop. PET consists of sensors that collect data such as home electricity or gasoline usage and send it to a database for analysis and presentation to the u...

Abstract Electronic mailing lists are popular Internet information sources. Many mailing lists maintain an archive of all messages sent to the list which is often searchable using keywords. While useful, these archives suffer from the fact that they include all messages sent to the list. Because they include all messages, the ability of users to ra...

The automobile industry has produced many cars with new features over the past decade. Taking advantage of advances in technology, cars today have fuel-efficient hybrid engines, proximately sensors, windshield wipers that can detect rain, built- in multimedia entertainment, and all-wheel drive systems that adjust power in real-time. However, the in...

We present a model of electrical power grid networks designed to assist utilities in handling problems in the grid, such as failed transmission lines. In particular, we address the problem of determining the best way to allocate limited power given varying priorities for different neighborhoods. The power grid is input as a directed graph with info...

The rising cost, increasing scarcity, and environmental im-pact of fossil fuels as an energy source makes a transition to cleaner, renewable energy sources an international im-perative. This paper presents Makahiki, an open source game engine for energy education and conservation. De-veloped for a residence hall energy competition, Makahiki facilit...

1 Summary Here are the key findings of the Hale Aloha energy audit conducted jointly between Housing and the Kukui Cup team: • It appears that there are no large, pervasive "hidden" electrical loads on the floors. We did see some differences in power use after trying to unplug all loads, but most of this is likely due to the scattered residents pre...