Social&Smart (SandS) is a EU funded research project starting on November 2012. Its goal is to build up a physical and computational networked infrastructure allowing household appliances to better meet the needs of their owners. With this Internet of Thing structure we virtually inject intelligence into the appliances. But, rather than endowing them with autonomously cognitive chips, in the purely humanoid thread of robotics, we ask for a social network to elaborate finely tuned instructions to be dispatched to the appliances. Thanks to its massive data feeding, the network is enabled to sophisticatedly rule the appliances so as to maintain their software constantly updated to the currently best practice. The crude matter dealt with by this structure is recipes, i.e. sequences of parameters which, dispatched to the appliances in terms of operational instructions, make them functioning properly. A distinguishing feature is the open-source thread. Software such as washing cycles or cooking timing is no longer a private matter of appliance producers. Rather, they emerge from a knowledge milieu where social network members share and refine their attitudes with other people who own the same or other smart appliances. The internet infrastructure comes from three converging perspectives:1. At a local scale, we need things (appliances and hubs) to wirelessly communicate with one another; 2. At a global level, we must integrate thousands of different appliances in a unique network. We will experiment this on three FIRE facility prototypes: Crew, OpenLab and SmartSantander; 3. From an abstract perspective the previous layers constitute the infrastructure where Internet-of-Thing and Internet-of-People merge to realize a user community.

The SandS System Actors

Involved FIRE facilities