Friday 25 October 2019

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!