Energy is a vital resource for human activities and lifestyle, powering important everyday infrastructures and services. Currently, pollutant and non-renewable sources, such as fossil fuels, remain the main source of worldwide consumed energy. The environmental impact of their exploitation has boosted research and investments in alternative, clean and renewable sources, including photovoltaic and windbased systems. As a whole, buildings are one of the major energy consumption sectors. Hence, improving energy efficiency in buildings will result in economical and environmental gains. In the case of households, home energy management systems are mainly used for monitoring real-time consumption and to schedule appliance operations so that the energy bill could be minimised, or according to another specific criterion. This work aims to survey the most recent literature on home energy management systems, providing an aggregated and unified perspective in the context of residential buildings. In addition, an updated literature list regarding commonly managed household appliances and scheduling objectives are included. Physical and operational constraints, and how they are addressed by home energy management systems along with security issues are also discussed. INDEX TERMS Energy efficiency, home energy management systems, household appliance models, load management, optimal scheduling, smart homes, security.

The increasingly popular use of Crowdsourcing as a resource to obtain labeled data has been contributing to the wide awareness of the machine learning community to the problem of supervised learning from multiple annotators. Several approaches have been proposed to deal with this issue, but they disregard sequence labeling problems. However, these are very common, for example, among the Natural Language Processing and Bioinformatics communities. In this paper, we present a probabilistic approach for sequence labeling using Conditional Random Fields (CRF) for situations where label sequences from multiple annotators are available but there is no actual ground truth. The approach uses the Expectation-Maximization algorithm to jointly learn the CRF model parameters, the reliability of the annotators and the estimated ground truth. When it comes to performance, the proposed method (CRF-MA) significantly outperforms typical approaches such as majority voting.

This paper presents a new neural network to solve the shortest path problem for internetwork routing. The proposed solution extends the traditional single-layer recurrent Hopfield architecture introducing a two-layer architecture that automatically guarantees an entire set of constraints held by any valid solution to the shortest path problem. This new method addresses some of the limitations of previous solutions, in particular the lack of reliability in what concerns successful and valid convergence. Experimental results show that an improvement in successful convergence can be achieved in certain classes of graphs. Additionally, computation performance is also improved at the expense of slightly worse results.Index Terms-Neural networks, shortest path computation problem, two-layer Hopfield neural network.

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With the increasing popularity of online crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), building supervised learning models for datasets with multiple annotators is receiving an increasing attention from researchers. These platforms provide an inexpensive and accessible resource that can be used to obtain labeled data, and in many situations the quality of the labels competes directly with those of experts. For such reasons, much attention has recently been given to annotator-aware models. In this paper, we propose a new probabilistic model for supervised learning with multiple annotators where the reliability of the different annotators is treated as a latent variable. We empirically show that this model is able to achieve state of the art performance, while reducing the number of model parameters, thus avoiding a potential overfitting. Furthermore, the proposed model is easier to implement and extend to other classes of learning problems such as sequence

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