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.