From Hive to Bulb

Last month I said a slightly sad farewell to many great friends as I left Hive. The smart home and internet of things fields present some truly interesting data science challenges, and over the past four years I've been fortunate enough to help people understand their energy usage, detect leaks in their house's plumbing and detect failures in their boiler. It's genuinely been an awesome journey, and I want to say a massive thank you to everyone I worked with along the way.

Earlier this month I started a new role as a senior data scientist at Bulb. Bulb are the UK's fastest growing energy supplier, with a mission to make energy simpler, cheaper and greener. The primary reason I joined Bulb was the opportunity to help their members save energy, and I'm excited to be working back in the field of smart metering. Hopefully this will also be good news for this blog too!

Towards reproducible state-of-the-art energy disaggregation

This week Nipun Batra will present a paper which aims to improve the reproducibility of state-of-the-art NILM at BuildSys 2019 in New York. The full paper is available online, which describes the new experiment and disaggregator APIs in NILMTK, along with a number of algorithms implemented in the nilmtk-contrib repository. The work will also be presented during the demo session to give NILM researchers some hands on experience using NILMTK's new disaggregation algorithms.

New Slack channel for the NILM community

Vicente Masip has set up a Slack channel for researchers to discuss anything related to NILM. Slack features include:

• Organised discussions: low f., highf.,home,industry,datasets
• Shared cloud resources at two clicks from your desktop.
• Polls
• Shared document editing
• Personalise each notification alert
• Repository of git repositories
• Chat (Faster than emails or forum)
• Space for NILM job candidates and recruiters
• Place to announce NILM papers publications, keynotes, workshops

The channel is open for anyone to join - please go ahead and introduce yourself! The invitation link is as follows:
https://join.slack.com/t/nilm/shared_invite/enQtODAzNTc0NTkwNjI2LTMzZmU1NzM3YTY1Y2RkODQzYjhiZjExYWE4MmUwZDJhZmZkMWI4NjFhMzU5YmM2MmFhMjNmMDY3MTY0MWQ0ZDA
and the channel URL is:
https://nilm.slack.com

EU NILM 2019 Workshop Summary

Earlier this month I attended the Sixth European Workshop on Non-intrusive Load Monitoring in sunny Thessaloniki, Greece, along with nearly 100 other researchers from academia and industry. The workshop featured 22 presentations over two days, along with a set of lightning talks, a poster and demo session, and a social event at a beautiful seafront restaurant. Overall, I think it was the smoothest workshop we've run so far, and we received some really positive feedback at the end of the workshop. For that I have to say a massive thank you to Dimitrios from NET2GRID for handling the local organisation, and Niki from Verv for handling the practical logistics.

There's always a slight risk when moving an event to a new location, but I was really encouraged to see a similar number of participants to last year's workshop in Germany. Furthermore, we saw an increase in the number of people watching the livestream, which is especially encouraging given the workshop's focus on enabling energy savings!

I particularly enjoyed Patrick Huber's talk on deep neural networks in NILM. I think this type of summary talk is ideal for the workshop, as it provides the audience with an overview of a large amount of academic literature in a short space of time. I was actually chairing this session, but I got so drawn in to the talk that I forgot to let Patrick know when he had 5 minutes remaining - sorry Patrick!

A few suggestions came up for improvements for next year:

• NILM Competition
• Metric standardisation 
• Panel discussion
• Peer review of short papers for academic submissions and abstracts for industry submissions

If you're interested in organising / contributing to any of the above, please get in touch!

Call for presentations deadline approaching for NILM 2019

The deadline for submitting presentation abstracts for NILM 2019 is now only 3 weeks away. As a reminder, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers that are working on the topic of energy disaggregation in both academia and industry. The workshop will feature two full days of conference-style material, following a similar format to the EU NILM 2018 conference. We hope to live stream the presentations via youtube, and also make videos of presentations available afterwards. Since the workshop will not feature published proceedings, we're encouraging relevant submissions which have previously appeared at other venues. We also welcome submissions from companies with results or data which they are willing to share with the community. Please submit your abstracts via this Google Form by 1 August 2019!

Also, we still have some tickets left for the workshop, which you can reserve via our EventBrite page.

Announcing EU NILM 2019

I am delighted to announce the dates for the 2019 European NILM Workshop! The workshop will take place on 1st-2nd October 2019 in Thessaloniki, Greece! Registration and the call for papers are now open. All information can be found at www.nilm.eu

IMPORTANT DATES:

• Early free ticket registration deadline: 31st May 2019
• General ticket sales begin: 1st June 2019 (€100 + VAT)
• Presentation abstract submission deadline: 1st August 2019
• Final registration deadline: 25th September 2019

NILM tutorial and special session at IEEE ICASSP

The International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing will be held on 12-17 May 2019 in Brighton, UK, and will feature both a tutorial and special session focused on NILM.

Tutorial on Unlocking the potential of smart meter data via signal and information processing

The tutorial will be given by Vladimir Stankovic and Lina Stankovic in the afternoon of the 13th May, and will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to Smart Metering and Smart Meter Signals
• Energy disaggregation
• Signal and Information Processing for NILM
• Smart meter signal processing beyond NILM
• Conclusion and open problems

Special session on Advanced Signal Processing for Non-intrusive Load Monitoring

This special session has been organised by Stephen Makonin and Angshul Majumdar. Further details can be found on Stephen's blog.