Thursday 29 March 2012

Paper accepted at AAAI on NIALM training

I recently received notification that my paper titled Non-intrusive Load Monitoring using Prior Models of General Appliance Types has been accepted at AAAI-2012. The paper will appear in the Computational Sustainability for AI track, for which I will give an oral and poster presentation at the conference. The abstract for the paper is below:

Non-intrusive appliance load monitoring is the process of disaggregating a household's total electricity consumption into its contributing appliances. In this paper we propose an approach by which individual appliances can be iteratively separated from an aggregate load. Unlike existing approaches, our approach does not require training data to be collected by sub-metering individual appliances, nor does it assume complete knowledge of the appliances present in the household. Instead, we propose an approach in which prior models of general appliance types are tuned to specific appliance instances using only signatures extracted from the aggregate load. The tuned appliance models are then used to estimate each appliance's load, which is subsequently subtracted from the aggregate load. This process is applied iteratively until all appliances for which prior behaviour models are known have been disaggregated. We evaluate the accuracy of our approach using the REDD data set, and show the disaggregation performance when using our training approach is comparable to when sub-metered training data is used. We also present a deployment of our system as a live application and demonstrate the potential for personalised energy saving feedback.

Full details can be found on my publications page.

Monday 19 March 2012

1st International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Mario Bergés recently pointed me towards this really exciting workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring:
http://www.ices.cmu.edu/psii/nilm/agenda.html
Some important information:

  • When: May 7th 2012
  • Where: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
  • Objective: Unite researchers from a variety of backgrounds working on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring
The agenda contains overview talks about the state of the art and also some spotlights from industry partners. There's also an afternoon poster session to present and gain feedback on any ongoing work. 

Overall, I think the event will be a great opportunity of learn about current research in both academia and industry, and I would thoroughly encourage anyone working in this area to consider attending. I'm planning to present some of my current work at the non-event based poster session, and hope you see some of your work at the workshop too!