Faculty Vacancy at Carnegie Mellon University

Mario Bergès asked me to share the following position at CMU:

Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) is inviting applications for a faculty position at all ranks (Assistant, Associate or Full Professor). They're seeking candidates with expertise in decarbonisation of the built environment and/or adaptation to climate change with a strong focus on engineering resilience. The ideal candidate should be able to model natural and/or engineered systems and their response, while at the same time propose technical engineering solutions to improve adaptation, resilience and/or decarbonisation efforts. They are specifically interested in candidates who are applying computational approaches, AI, digital twins, and systems modelling techniques in these areas. Through their research, education and service, candidates should also be able to support the department’s efforts in leading the world to a sustainable, resilient, equitable and inclusive future.

Key details:

• Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
• Application deadline: 1 December 2024
• Expected start date: August 2025

NILM 2022 deadline extended

 A follow up message from the NILM 2022 workshop organisers:

Dear NILM researcher/practitioner,

The deadline for submitting to the 6th International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM 2022) was extended. The final submission deadline is September 11, 2022 AoE.

The mission of this workshop is to serve as a forum for bringing together all the researchers, practitioners, and students that are working on the topic of energy disaggregation around the world.

NILM 2022 will be co-located with ACM BuildSys’22 with in-person and online options.

Website: http://nilmworkshop.org/2022/

Sincerely,

Lucas Pereira, Stephen Makonin, and Wenpeng Luan Organizers 

Lina Stankovic, TPC Chair

The Intl. NILM 2022 Workshop

The 6th International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM 2022) at BuildSys 2022

An exciting message from the NILM 2022 organisers:

Dear NILM researcher/practitioner,

We cordially invite you to submit a paper to the 6th International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM 2022) which will be co-located with BuildSys 2022 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA on November 9-10, 2022.

Please read the attached Call for Papers.

Sincerely,

Lucas Pereira, Stephen Makonin, and Wenpeng Luan

Organizers of the NILM 2022 Workshop

DEDDIAG data set released

Marc Wenninger, Andreas Maier & Jochen Schmidt have recently released DEDDIAG, a domestic electricity demand dataset of individual appliances in Germany. The data set contains recordings from 15 homes over a period of up to 3.5 years, in which 50 appliances have been recorded at a frequency of 1 Hz. The data set focuses on appliances of significance for load-shifting purposes, such as dishwashers, washing machines and refrigerators. One home also includes three-phase mains readings that can be used for disaggregation tasks. Additionally, DEDDIAG contains manual ground truth event annotations for 14 appliances, that provide precise start and stop timestamps. The authors have also released source code of the data collection system, as well as a python command line tool for loading the data.

NILM 2020 presentation videos available on Youtube

The NILM 2020 conference was held online in November last year, and featured 26 presentations on recent progress in the field. The individual talks are now available on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhs3Zf0KIDKnzUNwf8sXeN7QjsLTmlvnP

An introduction to the conference can be found in the following video:

NILM 2020 livestream

The NILM 2020 livestream has started:

The full agenda can be found on the NILM website.

NILM 2020 to be held online in November

The NILM 2020 Workshop will be a one day online conference held during the week commencing 16 November 2020. The workshop will be jointly organised by the International and European NILM Workshop teams, and will be free to attend. For the first time, the event will appear as a workshop of the larger ACM BuildSys conference, and accepted papers will be published in the ACM digital library. The paper submission deadline is 21 August, although abstracts should be registered by 14 August. Further details (including the conference date, registration and paper submission) will appear on the NILM 2020 Workshop website as they are finalised.

For context, this workshop represents the culmination of the 5th International NILM Workshop and the 7th European Workshop, as shown by the table below.

I look forward to seeing you online!

DEBS 2020 NILM Grand Challenge

The DEBS Grand Challenge is a series of competitions in which both academics and professionals compete with the goal of building faster and more accurate distributed and event-based system. This year, the DEBS Grand Challenge focuses on NILM, with the goal of detecting when appliances contributing to an aggregated stream of voltage and current readings from a smart meter are switched on or off. The track has already closed to submissions, but the submissions will be presented at the DEBS 2020 conference, which will be held on Thursday 16th July. The whole conference is virtual and registration is free for participants. Registrants have access to the 5 day online program, including tutorials, keynotes, and main conference presentations, as well as access to the Slack discussion channel. The papers can also be downloaded via the online programme.

IDEAL Household Energy Dataset released

The IDEAL Household Energy Dataset was recently announced by researchers at the University of Edinburgh. The data set description reads:

The IDEAL Household Energy Dataset comprises data from 255 UK homes. Alongside electric and gas data from each home the corpus contains individual room temperature and humidity readings and temperature readings from the boiler. For 39 of the 255 homes more detailed data is available, including individual electrical appliance use data, and data on individual radiators. Sensor data is augmented by anonymised survey data and metadata including occupant demographics, self-reported energy awareness and attitudes, and building, room and appliance characteristics.

George Hart's 1984 progress report: "Nonintrusive Appliance Load Data Acquisition Method"

Stephen Makonin recently made George Hart's 1984 progress report available, titled "Nonintrusive Appliance Load Data Acquisition Method". This is one of the earliest reports describing a NILM system, and shortly proceeds Hart's 1985 second progress report and 1992 summary report. Happy reading!

On another note, George Hart also gave the keynote presentation at the 2016 International NILM Workshop in Vancouver, where he talked about NILM in the 1980s, and his more recent interests in sculpture and education.

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.

Last chance to attend EU NILM 2018

The Fifth European NILM Workshop is just over 2 weeks away, and with over 150 registrants it already looks likely to be the largest NILM-focused event ever! The full agenda is available on the workshop website, although there might be a few minor changes in the run-up to the conference. There are a few tickets still available on EventBrite until the 26th September, so please register soon if you'd like to attend. We also have a few sponsorship options still available, so please get in touch via the Contact Us section at the bottom of www.nilm.eu if you're interested. See you in Duisburg :)

Announcing EU NILM 2018

We’re pleased to announce that the Fifth European Workshop on Non-intrusive Load Monitoring will be held on the 1-2 October 2018 in Duisburg, Germany. The aim of the European NILM conference series is to bring together all of the European researchers that are working on the topic of energy disaggregation in both industry and academia. See www.nilm.eu for full details. There are a limited number of tickets so please register as soon as possible.

Important dates:

• Early registration deadline: 1 September 2018 (free)
• Final registration deadline: 26 September 2018 (€100 + VAT)
• Call for speakers/demos deadline: 1 August 2018
• Agenda announcement: 15 August 2018
• Workshop dates: 1-2 October 2018

Call for presentations & demos

We invite attendees to submit presentation abstracts via this Google Form by 1 August 2018. We will aim to build a balanced agenda from a combination of invited talks and submitted abstracts, while the remaining submissions will be invited to present a lightning talk and a poster. Since the workshop will not feature published proceedings, we encourage 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.

Call for sponsors

We have a number of sponsorship options for the workshop, including opportunities to give a full presentation, present a demo, and exposure on the website and slides. We need sponsorship in order to provide lunch, refreshments and an evening reception, so please get in touch via sponsors@nilm.eu if you’re interested!

We look forward to welcoming you in Duisburg!

Presentation videos from NILM 2018 in Austin now available

I only recently noticed that videos from NILM 2018 in Austin are now available as a YouTube playlist. Here's a full list of the videos:

• An Experimental Comparison of Performance Metrics for Event Detection Algorithms in NILM
• Real-Time Itemized Electricity Consumption Intelligence for Military Bases
• Scalable Energy Breakdown Across Regions
• Pecan Street's Dataport
• Making Sense of UK smart meter data
• Poster Lightning Talks
• A Practical Discussion of Lessons Learned Deploying Disaggregation at Broad Scale
• An Emulator for NILM and Smart Home Research
• Panel Discussion on NILM Outlook & Next-Generation Applications
• On the Feasibility of Generic Deep Disaggregation for Single-Load Extraction
• FactorNet for Energy Disaggregation
• Post-processing for Event-based Non-intrusive Load Monitoring
• Power Signature Obfuscation using Flexible Building Loads

Credit to Stephen Makonin for cutting up the videos and uploading them!