NILM 2016 Livestream

Update 08:46 14.05.2016: new youtube link

Update 09:06 14.05.2016: new youtube link

The 3rd International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring will be held in Vancouver, Canada, from May 14 to 15 2016, at the beautiful mountaintop campus of Simon Fraser University. We are hoping to livestream the event on YouTube via the following link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YHBC-xvm4c

This livestream will be a little experimental, so please keep an eye on NILM2016 on Twitter if we encounter any technical difficulties. For those of you who are not able to attend or watch the livestream, we are hoping to upload videos of the presentations to YouTube to be viewed at a later date.

Data Management guest lecture

Yesterday I gave a guest lecture on Gopal Ramchurn's Data Management course at the University of Southampton. It was great fun exposing the first year Computer Science undergrads to technologies like Cassandra, Elastic Search and Kafka, while also contradicting a lot of what I was taught about database design on the same course 9 years ago. My favourite questions from the (surprisingly attentive) audience were:

• Doesn't all that data replication negate the point of using a database in the first place?
• Why wouldn't you pay for supported packages of open source technologies?

If you're interested in a similar guest lecture on your course please don't hesitate to get in touch!

NILM 2016 proceedings available and last chance to register

The proceedings of the upcoming NILM 2016 conference are now available for download. Furthermore, the full schedule has been released, which includes:

• Day 1 keynote by Lyn Bartram
• Day 2 keynote by George Hart
• 13 oral paper presentations
• Lightning talks and poster session
• 5 sponsor talks
• Industry & power utilities discussion panel

The registration deadline has been extended until 1st May 2016, so please register now if you'd like to attend. I look forward to seeing you there!

PNNL User Group 2nd Meeting

PNNL organised the second meeting of their NILM User Group on 5th April 2016. The meeting featured a reminder of the priority use cases resulting from the first meeting of the user group, a discussion of whether PNNL's NILM evaluation should use data from real homes or lab homes, and also a presentation of PNNL's investigation into the desirability of a wide range of accuracy metrics. Notes from the meeting have been uploaded to the Conduit community, and the next meeting is scheduled to take place in the next few weeks in order to finalise the metrics for PNNL's study, as well as present the plan for data collection.

NILM 2016 – Workshop Program

Cross posted from Stephen Makonin's blog:

The program for NILM 2016 has now been posted at http://nilmworkshop.org/2016/NILM2016_Program.pdf. The TPC has accepted 13 papers for presentation and will also feature 12 additional papers presented as posters. George W. Hart (credited as being the founder of NILM research) and Lyn Bartram (world renowned eco-visualization researcher) will be our keynote speakers.

The 3rd International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) will be held in Vancouver, Canada from May 14 to 15, 2016. This year’s venue will be the beautiful mountaintop campus of Simon Fraser University (SFU) which is located in the neighbouring municipality of Burnaby.

The mission of this workshop is to create a forum that can unite all the researchers, practitioners, and students that are working on the topic of energy disaggregation. The main objective of this event is to review the main types of approaches that have been explored to date to solve the problem of electricity disaggregation, and to then discuss possible paths forward knowing what has been tried and what has yet to be experimented. We also intend to have a group discussion about possible solutions to the growing need for standardized datasets and performance metrics that can allow the field to move forward, as well as possible areas of collaboration among different research groups.

Hope to see you there!

Stephen Makonin, Workshop General Chair, NILM 2016

Is deep learning the future of NILM?

Deep learning has recently revolutionised a number of well-studied machine learning and signal processing problems, such as image recognition and handwriting recognition. Furthermore, long short-term memory architectures have demonstrated the effectiveness of applying recurrent neural networks to time series problems, such as speech synthesis. In addition to the impressive performance of these models, the elegance of learning features from data rather than hand crafting intuitive features is a highly compelling advantage over traditional methods.

In the past year, deep learning methods have also started to be applied to energy disaggregation. For example, Jack Kelly demonstrated at BuildSys 2015 how such models outperform common disaggregation benchmarks and are able to generalise to previously unseen homes. In addition, Lukas Mauch presented a paper at GlobalSIP 2015 describing how sub-metered data can be used to train networks to disaggregate single appliances from a building's total load. Most recently, Pedro Paulo Marques do Nascimento's master's thesis compared a variety of convolutional and recurrent neural networks across a number of appliances present in the REDD data set. Each piece of research demonstrates that there's real potential to apply deep learning to the problem of energy disaggregation. 

However, two critical issues still remain. First, are the huge volumes of sub-metered data available which are required to train such models? Second, are the computational requirements of training these models practical? Fortunately, training can be performed offline if only general models of appliance types are to be learned. However, if learning is required for each individual household, surely this will need to take place on cloud infrastructure rather than embedded hardware. I hope we'll get closer to answering these questions at this year's international NILM conference in Vancouver!

NILM 2016 registration and paper submission now open

The 3rd International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM 2016) will be held in Vancouver, Canada from 14-15th May 2016, at the beautiful SFU Burnaby Mountain Campus. Registration for the conference is now open so make sure you book your place by 15th March (though please book early as space might be limited). The paper submission site is also now open until 24th April, along with an updated call for papers. We've also put together an excellent programme committee to ensure each paper receives feedback from experts in the field. For full details and updates, see the conference website:

http://nilmworkshop.org/2016/