This section lists all blog posts, regardless of topic.
Using computers for meal planningNovember 6, 2008
It strikes me that computers and home automation could be used to improve health and give people more free time if they were used for meal planning. Consider the following scenario:
"Grace, make a meal plan for this week."
The computer would have the following information at its disposal:
  | The family recipes, including ingredients lists, and therefore, nutritional value. Each recipe would have a rating to indicate how much it was liked. |
| An inventory of what food was currently in the fridge, freezer, and cupboards. |
| A record of what meals were eaten at home in previous weeks. |
Using this information, a meal plan could be put together that would:
| 1. | Be nutritionally balanced and not deficient in any important area. |
| 2. | Use foods more often that are already in the fridge, freezer, or cupboards. |
| 3. | Use foods more often that are in season, and likewise, foods that could be purchased from local producers. |
| 4. | Use recipes more often that are liked. |
| 5. | Not use recipes that were already used very recently. |
There are a number of variables to optimize, but that's what computers do best: Crunch possibilities and come up with something that is optimum. Since different families would value different things, there could be "sliders" to adjust how important the different criteria were, such as how important it is to use local foods.
Another, related use case would be to ask: "Grace, recommend a recipe for tonight", which would take into account what foods were already in the house to plan a tasty meal, helping to use up foods that would otherwise go bad and reducing unnecessary trips to the grocery store.
Exercise 37: Alarm clockNovember 6, 2008
SummaryAn interesting use of this technology is an alarm clock:
| "Set the alarm clock for 6:30" |
| "Wake us up tomorrow morning at 6:30" |
| "Wake us up tomorrow morning at 6:30 with Chariots of Fire" |
The concept of an alarm clock could be extended in many ways. For instance, it could read a weather forecast, remind a person about what they're doing that day, etc. An example:
Good morning.
It's Thursday, November 6th.
Your grandpa Bigham would have been 98 years old today.
It is currently 4 degrees celsius;
today will be sunny with a high of 14.
Remember your dentist appointment at 3:45.
-> Plays CBC podcast of the morning news
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Speaker identificationNovember 6, 2008
Speaker identification is the task of listening to a person's speech and figuring out who they are. People are pretty good at this, although it can be tricky over the phone.
The use case in home automation is resolving the words "I", "me", and "my". If a user says, "When is my next dentist appointment", the computer needs to determine who is speaking to be able to answer the question.
In thinking about this, I realized that the problem is made easier by the fact that a user is always going to be using the words "I", "me", or "my" in these cases, and so the system, if it has a voice print for the user saying these words, has a place to start.
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