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It was a fishy way for a scientist to start wiring houses onto Web

Monday, September 18, 2000

By TOM PAULSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The fish started it.

Yi-Min Wang, a scientist at Microsoft Research, loves his fish. And so he used to worry about them, especially when the occasional storm rolled through and knocked out power. Wang would rush home to check on his fish tanks.

"I thought to myself, this isn't right," he said.

What wasn't right is that Wang is a leading computer scientist at Microsoft -- surrounded by all the technical expertise and resources the company has to offer -- and yet he still had to drive across town simply to find out if his five fish tanks were working.

Photo  
Microsoft's Yi-Min Wang, creator of the Aladdin home-networking system. Paul Kitagaki Jr./P-I  
"It was ridiculous," he decided. So Wang shifted some of his efforts away from his official Microsoft Research focus on systems networking over to figuring out how to make his fish tanks accessible over the Internet.

The result is "Aladdin" -- Wang's up-and-running project (now official and involving colleagues Wilf Russell and Anish Arora) that demonstrates how to wire a house onto the Web using existing home wiring and relatively inexpensive off-the-shelf technology.

There are companies out there already marketing "smart home" technology, Wang noted, but many of these systems are often pricey, specialized or not really too smart.

What the Microsoft scientist wanted to create was a relatively cheap and reliable smart and wired home that didn't require specialized wiring or new technologies.

"In order to get home networking to take off, we need to rely on existing wiring," Wang said.

"Wire is just wire and any wire can carry bits."

Using some Radio Shack devices, his home's telephone lines, standard electrical wiring and radio frequencies on the airwaves, the Microsoft scientist now has a home that does a lot more than simply allow him to check on his fish.

Aladdin is a system of six PCs that are connected to each other and to devices in Wang's home. They monitor what's happening and talk to each other using the power lines in the home as well as the telephone lines.

Wang's house knows when you plug in a lamp or an appliance.

Using those PC "eyeball cams," Aladdin allows Wang to visually check rooms in his home from anywhere using his laptop. He can see if the garage is open, if the lights are off or if there's an intruder.

If he wants to close the garage door or turn on some lights, he can send his house an e-mail message.

Hit "send" and the garage door closes, the lights go on.

If something happens at home, like a leaking fish tank, a sensor informs the house network and the house automatically sends Wang an e-mail alert.

All this is based on some pretty sophisticated software techniques developed by Wang and his colleagues. But the aim of Aladdin is to create a system that anyone can use.

"I don't want to have to learn anything to make this work," said Wang's wife, Emerald Chung. Her favorite use of Aladdin, she said, was when they came home late one evening and their two young boys, Jeffrey and Andrew, fell asleep in the car.

They pulled into the garage and decided it would be best to wake them gradually.

"We asked the computer to keep asking them to wake up," Emerald Chung said. The eyeball cam in the garage allowed the parents to see when the boys finally woke up.

"It's cool," Jeffrey said.

Wang and his colleagues have also worked on maintaining security in the home network so would-be cyberburglars can't intercept -- or manipulate -- commands on the Internet to gain illicit access or information. All the signals sent to and from his house are encrypted and contain an embedded password.

Simplicity and reliability is key, too, he said.

"People won't want a system that is only 95 percent reliable," Wang said. Aladdin has to be as reliable and simple to use as the telephone, he said, which means it will need to be flexible and "self-stabilizing."

Self-stabilization, Wang explained, means the home network will have to be able to adjust to changes (like power outages) without requiring the homeowner to do anything.

Aladdin isn't a system ready for mass marketing yet, he noted. The project, he said, is simply to show that wiring your home to the Internet isn't waiting for major new innovations. Wang's wired home may sound futuristic, but it's not that far off in the future.

"In a few years, it will seem really weird to people that there was a time when you couldn't check on your house as easily as you can now check your stocks or the weather," Wang said. "This is an obvious extension of the Web."

P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattle-pi.com

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