The increasing number of web enabled appliances and devices and the widespread availability of broadband communications to the home are finally enabling the emergence of new Internet-based “intelligent” consumer services for the home. Compared to previous attempts to enable the “smart" or "intelligent" home, in which the intelligence was based on centralized control in the home through a home server or home gateway, the intelligence in the new services resides in the network, or more precisely in the Internet cloud. This new paradigm opens up completely new opportunities for innovative services that exploit the computational power and scalability of the cloud, as well as the knowledge derived from the aggregation of data from a population rather than the individual home.
For instance, in an energy management application the power consumption of individual homes could be controlled based on the power demand (and availability) for a neighborhood or a city. The entertainment industry (games, TV) have led the way in providing services based on this paradigm for a number of years, but more recently a number of other industries are investing in similar technologies to provide new services in healthcare, security and surveillance, energy management, and the like. A new era of innovative services for the homes could come about from the availability of a neutral, open, secure and scalable platform in the cloud to support millions of connected devices with the service providers that create value for consumers
A Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), he has served as editor of IEEE Transactions for Circuits and Systems for Video Technology and is currently on the editorial board of ACM’s Computers in Entertainment. He also served as the US head of delegation to the ISO MPEG standards conference.