This smart office may make you want to work late

Imagine having a personal monitoring system at work that makes sure the temperature is always perfect for you, and turns lights on or off whenever you enter or leave a room.

This is what the employees at Carlo Ratti Associati , an international design and innovation firm, get to experience every day.

Carlo Ratti Associati has produced ‘Office 3.0,’ a newly developed smart system for the workplace that takes the Internet of Things to a whole new playing field1.

Specially designed for the firm’s Agnelli Foundation headquarters in Torino, Italy, this amazing technology offers personalized heating, lighting and cooling that follows occupants around their office. The firm’s goal is to reduce energy use by up to 40 percent, with the aid of this new technology system.

How this new office works

A network of sensors called the Building Management System monitor each individual’s movements along with different sets of data including temperature, CO2 concentration, occupancy levels and the status of meeting rooms.  Using the information collected, the system then responds accordingly and sends instructions throughout the building.

It will turn off lights in a room that is not being used, or heat meeting spaces right before people need to use them. When an individual leaves a certain area, the room automatically enters a standby mode, similar to what a computer does when it isn’t being used.

The Building Management System works via an app that all employees are asked to download.  Each individual enters their temperature preferences along with other data, which is how the “weather sphere” surrounds them during their work day, knowing what degree to set their offices at.

Carlo Ratti, Director of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the founder of Carlo Ratti Associati states, “Today, a lot of energy is wasted heating or cooling empty buildings. By synchronizing energy usage and human occupancy within buildings we can create a more sustainable and responsive architecture.”

Office 3.0 offers an amazing example of what future work places can offer.  This technology could be used for other places such as stores or apartments too.  With the amount of energy it can potentially save, this cost effective program may become the norm in a few more years.

AI detects cyber attacks with accuracy after attending MIT

Researchers with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have announced a breakthrough in cyber threat detection that promises to dramatically lower the amount of time human analysts spend sorting through information in search of evidence of cyber attacks.

IT analysts spend countless hours scouring through mountains of data in order to find evidence of compromised systems. Often, the search for anomalies in data is so extensive, that overwhelmed human teams are forced to overlook potentially critical information for lack of time.

That’s where MIT’s researchers believe they can help. In a world where most companies are under constant threat of cyber attack, having a system that never sleeps or takes a coffee break is a big help.

AI Squared (AI2), an artificial intelligence project created by the team at CSAIL, is able to detect cyber attacks with an incredible 85% accuracy.1

This success rate didn’t come overnight. In fact, the team at CSAIL has been teaching AI2 to better identify and filter out false positives over time which are a big cause of wasted man-hours.

It isn’t enough to input a set of things to look out for and have it feed you data as it comes across them.

This would require a lot of time on the part of human analysts sorting between false positives and actual signs of attack.

Instead, AI2 continuously generates new models, which are refined in a matter of hours and benefit from occasional human input.

This human input includes letting the AI know when it has delivered a false positive, so it can not only model what a true cyber attack looks like, but also to identify when an anomaly isn’t caused by one.

So, over time, AI2 would send less and less false positives to human analysts to review, leaving them more time to evaluate and resolve actual threats.

Over time, the new AI platform has been able to improve the filtering out of false positives five-fold, with a three-fold improvement in detection capabilities.

In an age where stories about AI going bonkers are commonplace, it’s refreshing to see that some projects are doing a lot of good.