3rd Int’l Workshop on NILM — SAVE THE DATE!

The 3rd International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) will be held in Vancouver, Canada from May 14 to 15, 2016. The venue for the workshop is still under consideration. Last workshop was held June/2014 at the University of Texas, Austin, in Austin, TX.

The agenda for the NILM2016 is still being defined, but the current proposal is to have two full-days of activities. There will be working groups, paper presentations and a poster session. We have two confirmed invited speakers George W. Hart and Robert Sonderegger (Itron). Website will go live first week of January 2016 (http://nilmworkshop.org/2016/).

WORKSHOP MISSION AND OBJECTIVES

The mission of this workshop is to create a forum that can unite all the researchers, practitioners, and students that are working on the topic of energy disaggregation. The main objective of this event is to review the main types of approaches that have been explored to date to solve the problem of electricity disaggregation, and to then discuss possible paths forward knowing what has been tried and what has yet to be experimented. We also intend to have a group discussion about possible solutions to the growing need for standardized datasets and performance metrics that can allow the field to move forward, as well as possible areas of collaboration among different research groups.

PAPER SUBMISSION AND AUTHOR INFORMATION

We invite all researchers working on NILM-related topics to submit 4-page papers to the conference for oral presentation or presentation during a poster session. All submissions must use IEEE style files for LaTeX or Word. We encourage authors to submit papers on research that is ongoing or contains recent results: as the workshop will only include online proceedings, submission to the workshop will not prevent any material from being submitted later to a journal or conference.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission Deadline: March 15
Notification of Acceptance: April 10
Final Paper Submission Due: April 24
Registration Deadline: April 24

Registration Fee: FREE

Keynote Speaker: George W. Hart
Invited Speaker: Robert Sonderegger, Itron

We are looking forward to welcoming you to NILM 2016 in Vancouver!

Stephen Makonin
Workshop General Chair
3rd International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM)

Update 04.01.2016: deadlines have been pushed back.
Update 18.02.2016: updated CFP available on conference website

REFIT Electrical Load Measurements dataset released

The REFIT Electrical Load Measurements dataset is an output of the REFIT: Personalised Retrofit Decision Support Tools for UK Homes using Smart Home Technology project, which is a consortium of three universities - Loughborough, Strathclyde and East Anglia. The whole team contributed to the data acquisition and dataset design. The data set contains active power measurements of the aggregate and 9 individual appliances from 20 homes in the Loughborough area of the UK, at a resolution of 1 sample every 8 seconds. This makes the REFIT the largest UK data set (in number of houses) which contains appliance level data at a sample rate great than once per minute. In addition, aggregate gas consumption data was also recorded at 30 minute intervals, although no sub-metered data was also collected. It should be noted that the data has been compressed by removing samples for which the power demand had not changed since the last reading. Further details can be found in a presentation from the EEDAL 2015 conference, a detailed technical report, and the dataset readme file.

I've updated my list of Public Data Sets to include the REFIT data set, and I'm also hoping that a NILMTK converter will follow shortly!

Edit 04.01.2016: The REFIT is not the only UK dataset to contain appliance level data at a sample rate greater than 1 minute as initially claimed! The UK-DALE data set also meets that criteria.

Kien Trung's PhD defence

Last week I had the pleasure of being an examiner for Nguyen Kien Trung's PhD thesis at the Université Nice Sophia Antipolis. Kien's thesis focused on a an efficient electricity disaggregation algorithm which he deployed using a low-cost system-on-chip. Kien successfully defended his thesis against the panel's questions, which sometimes came in a mixture of English and French, which I found particularly very impressive!

I also managed a brief visit to Qualisteo's office, who demonstrated some the disaggregation algorithms they're applying across a range of built environments, including the Eiffel Tower, a motorway tunnel and a sports stadium. I had a great time, but hopefully my next trip to Nice will last a little longer than 24 hours!

NILM @ GlobalSIP 2015

The 3rd IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing will be held next month (14-16 December 2015) in Orlando, Florida. I was excited to see quite how many papers in the program are related to energy disaggregation, which are split across two sessions organised as part of the Smart Buildings Symposium and the Inference and Prediction session:

Toward a Semi-Supervised Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring System for Event-based Energy Disaggregation. Karim Said Barsim and Bin Yang (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

A new approach for supervised power disaggregation by using a deep recurrent LSTM network. Lukas Mauch and Bin Yang (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Blind Non-intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring using Graph-based Signal Processing. Bochao Zhao, Vladimir Stankovic and Lina Stankovic (University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom)

A New Unsupervised Event Detector For Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring. Benjamin Wild, Karim Said Barsim and Bin Yang (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Dataport and NILMTK: A Building data set Designed for Non-intrusive Load Monitoring. Oliver Parson (University of Southampton, United Kingdom); Grant Fisher and April Hersey (Pecan Street Inc, USA); Nipun Batra (IIIT Delhi, India); Jack Kelly (Imperial College London, United Kingdom); Amarjeet Singh (IIIT-Delhi, India); William J Knottenbelt (Imperial College London, United Kingdom); Alex Rogers (University of Southampton, United Kingdom)

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring: A Power Consumption Based Relaxation. Kyle Anderson, Jose Moura and Mario Berges (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

A feasibility study of automated plug-load identification from high-frequency measurements. Jingkun Gao (Carnegie Mellon University, USA); Emre C Kara (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA); Suman Giri and Mario Berges (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Single-Channel Compressive Sampling of Electrical Data for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring. Michelle Clark and Lutz Lampe (University of British Columbia, Canada)

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring of HVAC Components using Signal Unmixing. Alireza Rahimpour (The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA); Hairong Qi (the University of Tennessee, USA)

I'm really looking forward to the conference, and will do my best to update this post with links to papers as they become available.