NILMTK Survey

We've seen some really encouraging adoption of NILMTK (our open-source toolkit for non-intrusive load monitoring) since we started work on it a year ago. However, it's quite hard to keep track of how people our using the toolkit, what features they'd like to see, and what direction the toolkit should be heading in. For this reason, we've created a NILMTK Survey, which will hopefully solve these problems. Please fill out the survey if you have any interest in energy disaggregation research, and let us know what's important to you. Thanks!

Energy disaggregation bloggers

There's a great amount of blogging going on in the NILM research field, so this post aims to collect all these resources together in a single hub. As always, please let me know if I've missed anyone!

Nipun Batra

Nipun is a final year student at IIIT Delhi, who writes about energy disaggregation research, as well as some more general programming solutions he has come across. Nipun also kicked off the NILMTK project.

Mario Bergés

Mario is an assistant professor at CMU, who mostly writes about upcoming workshops and conferences which are highly relevant to NILM. Mario is an incredibly busy person, which somewhat explains why he describes his own blog as having a tendency to remain silent.

Kyle Bradbury

Kyle is a postdoctoral energy fellow at Duke University, who writes about a broad spectrum of energy issues beyond that of just NILM. Kyle is involved with a number of interdisciplinary energy projects at Duke, which draw from disciplines such as engineering, economics, policy, and behavioural science to solve energy problems.

Suman Giri

Suman is one of Mario's students at CMU, who writes about recent developments at their Intelligent Infrastructure Research Laboratory. Suman has done some great work around high-frequency NILM, and has released code for both data collection and disaggregation.

Jack Kelly

Jack is a final year student at Imperial College London, who frequently writes on his energy disaggregation blog. He's very active in the community, and has released a UK data set as well as open sourcing his metadata project. Jack is also a collaborator (and chief architect) on the NILMTK project.

Stephen Makonin

Stephen is a postdoctoral research fellow at Simon Fraser University. Stephen has completed a large amount work in the domain of smart meter data analytics, as well as releasing the AMPds data set.

Work with ITG

I've recently been doing some work with ITG, an IT and management consulting firm based in Washington DC, specialising in Real Estate IT. ITG has also been working in the field of non-intrusive load monitoring and is in the process of building an energy monitoring system. I was happy to provide a program of presentations and discussions to bring them up to speed with my experiences in the field. I really enjoyed the time I spent working with ITG, and hope I have the chance to return in the future.

ITG's office Washington DC, USA

Energy disaggregation at BuildSys 2014

I attended the BuildSys 2014 conference over the last two days, which was held on 5-6 November in Memphis, TN, USA. I was really impressed at the amount of NILM research in the main conference track, including a dedicated session on Thursday morning focusing entirely on energy disaggregation. This prompted some great discussions during the breaks, mostly centred around the potential for a third party evaluation tool and/or a NILM competition, similar to the one organised by Belkin. Both are very difficult problems and are probably worthy of their own blog post, which I'll hopefully write in the next few days.

I presented a demo of NILMTK v0.2, our latest release of the open source toolkit, which adds support for data sets which are too large to fit into memory, as well as providing support for a common data set schema via the NILM Metadata project. The demo was really well received, and ended up winning the best demo award. I presented the demo using an iPython notebook, similar to the demo that Jack Kelly presented at the NILM 2014 conference, which is available for all to view at the following URL:

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/nilmtk/nilmtk/blob/master/notebooks/BuildSys_2014_demo.ipynb

Update (12.11.2014): Jack Kelly has written an excellent proposal for an MSc group project covering the range of issues which a third party validation tool / disaggregation competition must address.