To understand how users interact with smart energy systems, a team of researchers from Electronics and
Computer Science (ECS)
at Southampton and the University of Zurich produced three different smart thermostats that automated heating based on users» heating preferences and real -
time price variations: a manual one through which participants explicitly
specify how the heating should respond to price changes, and two learning - based ones that employed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to automate the temperature settings based on learned households» preferences.