Post first NILM workshop thoughts

I've just got back to the UK after attending the 1st International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring in Pittsburgh, USA. First of all, I'd like to congratulate the organisers, Mario Bergés and Zico Kolter, for putting together such a great programme. By my guesses, there must have been 40-50 attendees, from academia, industry and other nonprofit organisations, which in my opinion well represented the research in this field to date.

I particularly enjoyed Sidhant Gupta's very well prepared video and video-conference link up from CHI 2012 in Austin. Sidhant's work takes quite a different perspective to most of the other work we saw at the workshop, since it uses the high frequency electromagnetic interference generated by appliances' switch mode power supplies as the basis for disaggregation. If you weren't at the workshop, you can find a small portion of the video he showed linked to from his website.

The topic of data set availability kept coming up throughout the day. I got the distinct impression that the academic community was crying out for more data, while the industry folks were unsure of how they could open up their own data sets to push the community forward. In the panel session, Zico raised the point that people shouldn't wait to perfect their data set before releasing it. This spurred Mario to release a data set from his home, and hopefully many more will emerge in the near future.

With REDD and Mario's data, that makes 2 data sets out in the wild for benchmarking NIALM methods. If I start to see any other data sets appear, I'll start blog post to help people keep track of them. I'll do my best to keep it up to date, but please email me or comment if you notice any mistakes or omissions.

1st International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Mario Bergés recently pointed me towards this really exciting workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring:
http://www.ices.cmu.edu/psii/nilm/agenda.html
Some important information:

• When: May 7th 2012
• Where: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
• Objective: Unite researchers from a variety of backgrounds working on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

The agenda contains overview talks about the state of the art and also some spotlights from industry partners. There's also an afternoon poster session to present and gain feedback on any ongoing work. 

Overall, I think the event will be a great opportunity of learn about current research in both academia and industry, and I would thoroughly encourage anyone working in this area to consider attending. I'm planning to present some of my current work at the non-event based poster session, and hope you see some of your work at the workshop too!