EPRI EU NILM 2016 review

"NILM is a challenging problem. But it’s not impossible." This was one of Prof Bin Yang's five concluding messages of his keynote talk at EU EPRI NILM 2016. I think this sums up pretty much every NILM researcher's feelings, but lets face it, there wouldn't be much much need to hold such a conference if NILM was an easy problem. In his talk, Bin started with the fundamentals of source separation, and went on to relate energy disaggregation to a number of other separation problems, including image segmentation and speaker diarisation. Our other keynote talk was given by Chris Holmes of EPRI, who described their motivation for co-organising the workshop, as well as their recent work in evaluating a large number of NILM vendors in both North America and Europe.

In addition to the two keynote talks, the workshop featured 25 other talks from NILM vendors, academics and utilities. The workshop was attended by roughly 100 people across the two days, from countries far beyond Europe, including Japan and Korea. While we did our best to live stream the event, bandwidth limitations affected the audio and video quality on the first day, but the stream made a miraculous recovery for the second day. A playlist of (most of the) individual presentations is available on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJrF-gxa0ImrCOG4rn0b_cgYCTK5n7TLZ

I personally really enjoyed the event, and given the attendance numbers and feedback we've received so far, I think it confirms the demand for NILM-focused events on both sides on the Atlantic. Having said that, I hope to see you all next year, and don't forgot to bring your NILM bingo card ;)

Update 21.10.2016: replaced live stream videos with playlist of individual presentations.