In the future, smart home appliances could work in harmony to make money, or to provide more computing capacity, for their owners.

A computer science researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has devised an architecture, called Aura, that would let people harness all the unused computer cycles generated by their smart home devices.

With Aura, “everybody will become a cloud services provider,” said Ragib Hasan, an assistant professor and director of the university’s Secure and Trustworthy Computing Lab (SECRETLab).

Aura, created by a team led by Hasan, can connect dozens or even hundreds of devices to make them work as a single computational resource.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here