3rd Int’l Workshop on NILM — SAVE THE DATE!

The 3rd International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) will be held in Vancouver, Canada from May 14 to 15, 2016. The venue for the workshop is still under consideration. Last workshop was held June/2014 at the University of Texas, Austin, in Austin, TX.

The agenda for the NILM2016 is still being defined, but the current proposal is to have two full-days of activities. There will be working groups, paper presentations and a poster session. We have two confirmed invited speakers George W. Hart and Robert Sonderegger (Itron). Website will go live first week of January 2016 (http://nilmworkshop.org/2016/).

WORKSHOP MISSION AND OBJECTIVES

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.

PAPER SUBMISSION AND AUTHOR INFORMATION

We invite all researchers working on NILM-related topics to submit 4-page papers to the conference for oral presentation or presentation during a poster session. All submissions must use IEEE style files for LaTeX or Word. We encourage authors to submit papers on research that is ongoing or contains recent results: as the workshop will only include online proceedings, submission to the workshop will not prevent any material from being submitted later to a journal or conference.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission Deadline: March 15
Notification of Acceptance: April 10
Final Paper Submission Due: April 24
Registration Deadline: April 24

Registration Fee: FREE

Keynote Speaker: George W. Hart
Invited Speaker: Robert Sonderegger, Itron

We are looking forward to welcoming you to NILM 2016 in Vancouver!

Stephen Makonin
Workshop General Chair
3rd International Workshop on Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM)

Update 04.01.2016: deadlines have been pushed back.
Update 18.02.2016: updated CFP available on conference website

REFIT Electrical Load Measurements dataset released

The REFIT Electrical Load Measurements dataset is an output of the REFIT: Personalised Retrofit Decision Support Tools for UK Homes using Smart Home Technology project, which is a consortium of three universities - Loughborough, Strathclyde and East Anglia. The whole team contributed to the data acquisition and dataset design. The data set contains active power measurements of the aggregate and 9 individual appliances from 20 homes in the Loughborough area of the UK, at a resolution of 1 sample every 8 seconds. This makes the REFIT the largest UK data set (in number of houses) which contains appliance level data at a sample rate great than once per minute. In addition, aggregate gas consumption data was also recorded at 30 minute intervals, although no sub-metered data was also collected. It should be noted that the data has been compressed by removing samples for which the power demand had not changed since the last reading. Further details can be found in a presentation from the EEDAL 2015 conference, a detailed technical report, and the dataset readme file.

I've updated my list of Public Data Sets to include the REFIT data set, and I'm also hoping that a NILMTK converter will follow shortly!

Edit 04.01.2016: The REFIT is not the only UK dataset to contain appliance level data at a sample rate greater than 1 minute as initially claimed! The UK-DALE data set also meets that criteria.

Kien Trung's PhD defence

Last week I had the pleasure of being an examiner for Nguyen Kien Trung's PhD thesis at the Université Nice Sophia Antipolis. Kien's thesis focused on a an efficient electricity disaggregation algorithm which he deployed using a low-cost system-on-chip. Kien successfully defended his thesis against the panel's questions, which sometimes came in a mixture of English and French, which I found particularly very impressive!

I also managed a brief visit to Qualisteo's office, who demonstrated some the disaggregation algorithms they're applying across a range of built environments, including the Eiffel Tower, a motorway tunnel and a sports stadium. I had a great time, but hopefully my next trip to Nice will last a little longer than 24 hours!

NILM @ GlobalSIP 2015

The 3rd IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing will be held next month (14-16 December 2015) in Orlando, Florida. I was excited to see quite how many papers in the program are related to energy disaggregation, which are split across two sessions organised as part of the Smart Buildings Symposium and the Inference and Prediction session:

Toward a Semi-Supervised Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring System for Event-based Energy Disaggregation. Karim Said Barsim and Bin Yang (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

A new approach for supervised power disaggregation by using a deep recurrent LSTM network. Lukas Mauch and Bin Yang (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Blind Non-intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring using Graph-based Signal Processing. Bochao Zhao, Vladimir Stankovic and Lina Stankovic (University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom)

A New Unsupervised Event Detector For Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring. Benjamin Wild, Karim Said Barsim and Bin Yang (University of Stuttgart, Germany)

Dataport and NILMTK: A Building data set Designed for Non-intrusive Load Monitoring. Oliver Parson (University of Southampton, United Kingdom); Grant Fisher and April Hersey (Pecan Street Inc, USA); Nipun Batra (IIIT Delhi, India); Jack Kelly (Imperial College London, United Kingdom); Amarjeet Singh (IIIT-Delhi, India); William J Knottenbelt (Imperial College London, United Kingdom); Alex Rogers (University of Southampton, United Kingdom)

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring: A Power Consumption Based Relaxation. Kyle Anderson, Jose Moura and Mario Berges (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

A feasibility study of automated plug-load identification from high-frequency measurements. Jingkun Gao (Carnegie Mellon University, USA); Emre C Kara (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA); Suman Giri and Mario Berges (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Single-Channel Compressive Sampling of Electrical Data for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring. Michelle Clark and Lutz Lampe (University of British Columbia, Canada)

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring of HVAC Components using Signal Unmixing. Alireza Rahimpour (The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA); Hairong Qi (the University of Tennessee, USA)

I'm really looking forward to the conference, and will do my best to update this post with links to papers as they become available.

Hangout On Air: NILMTK Algorithm Interface Discussion

This Friday, we're planning to have a discussion around how best to integrate existing disaggregation algorithms into NILMTK via a Google Hangout On Air. The Hangout will take place at 16.30 UTC on Friday 20th November 2015, which I believe translates to 08.30 PST and 22.00 IST. Jack Kelly, Nipun Batra and myself will be available give the NILMTK perspective, while Stephen Makonin and Mingjun Zhong will be joining us to discuss how they'd like to integrate their algorithms into the toolkit.

A provisional agenda for the call is:

• Overview of NILMTK algorithm interface - Oliver Parson (15 mins)
• Discussion of sparseNILM algorithm - Stephen Makonin (15 mins)
• Discussion of Latent Bayesian Melding applied to NILM - Mingjun Zhong (15 mins)
• General Q&A (15 mins)

I've created a Google+ event which provides more details about the call. If you'd like to join the discussion, please follow the link to the event and launch the Hangout from the event page. If you'd prefer just listen in rather than joining the discussion, you can watch and listen live on YouTube. The video from the Hangout should be available on YouTube after the call, and I will try to update this post with the corresponding link.

Update 23.11.2015: a video from the call is available on YouTube.

BuildSys 2015: My Disaggregation is Better Than Yours

Akshay presenting his paper on LocED

Last week I had the pleaure of chairing a session named 'My disaggregation is better than yours', at the 2015 BuildSys conference in Seoul. The session featured presentations of the following three papers:

• Multi-User Energy Consumption Monitoring and Anomaly Detection with Partial Context Information. Pandarasamy Arjunan (IIIT-Delhi), Harshad D Khadilkar (IBM Research), Tanuja Ganu (IBM Research), Zainul M Charbiwala (IBM Research), Amarjeet Singh (IIIT-Delhi), Pushpendra Singh (IIIT-Delhi)
• LocED: Location-aware Energy Disaggregation Framework. S.N. Akshay Uttama Nambi (TUDelft), Antonio Reyes Lua (TUDelft), R. Venkatesha Prasad (TUDelft)
• Neural NILM: Deep Neural Networks Applied to Energy Disaggregation. Jack Kelly (Imperial College London), William Knottenbelt (Imperial College London) [joint best presentation]

Even outside this session, there were a few other papers relevant to NILM, including the following papers:

• If You Measure It, Can You Improve It? Exploring The Value of Energy Disaggregation. Nipun Batra (IIIT-Delhi), Amarjeet Singh (IIIT-Delhi), Kamin Whitehouse (University of Virginia)
• Health Monitoring of Elderly Residents via Disaggregated Smart Meter Data and Log Gaussian Cox Processes. Jose Alcala (University of Alcala), Oliver Parson (University of Southampton), Alex Rogers (University of South Hampton)
• Contextual Air Conditioning Disaggregation with Probabilistic Soft Logic. Sabina Tomkins (University of California Santa Cruz), Lise Getoor (University of California Santa Cruz)

To the best of my knowlege, this is the first conference with published proceedings with such a large amount of work related energy disaggregation. I'm glad that NILM is starting to find a common home at such a great venue, and I'm already looking forward to BuildSys 2016 at Stanford!

Energy disaggregation for health monitoring

José and I have been working on a project to apply NILM methods to the health monitoring domain, specifically to help monitor the activity of elderly people living independently in their own homes. The approach we pursued aims to disaggregate the kettle reliably from smart meter data, without requiring any training in each home. We chose to use the kettle as the appliance of interest as it is an appliance common to almost all UK homes, is used regularly as part of most elderly people’s daily routine, and also has a signature which varies little between houses.

The core novelty of the our work is that deviations in kettle usage from the normal routine can be recognised from the disaggregated smart meter data, allowing interventions in households to occur as soon as possible. Crucially, such routines are learned individually for each household, rather than using a static routine for all households. As such, kettle usage is used as a proxy for health, since no additional sensors were installed to directly measure health parameters (e.g. heart rate).

An example of a routine for a single household is shown below. The top graph shows the probability that the kettle would be used at least once within a half hour interval, while the bottom graph shows the cumulative probability that the kettle would have been used at least once by that time of the day. It can be seen that for this household, a highly repeatable routine is followed, where the kettle is used by midday on about 80% of days.

Full details can be found in our paper to be presented at BuildSys later this year:

José Alcalá, Oliver Parson, Alex Rogers. Detecting Anomalies in Activities of Daily Living of Elderly Residents via Energy Disaggregation and Cox Processes. In: 2nd ACM International Conference on Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys), Seoul, South Korea. 2015.