Disaggregate household energy consumption into individual appliances
Imagine an energy feedback system that displays not only your total power consumption, but also continuously shows real-time usage, broken down by electrical appliance. Such a system could provide personalized and cost-effective energy saving recommendations. For example, it could report, "Based on your usage patterns, you could save $215 per year by switching to a more efficient heating unit, which will pay for itself in 27 months." The challenge in this scenario is to sense end-uses of energy to provide feedback at the fine-grained, appliance level.
There has been substantial prior research in this area [1,5,6,7,8], however most of this work has concentrated on the use of power consumption patterns and using changes in power draw as features to identify what appliance is being used and how much energy it is consuming. We recommend the reader refer to [2,3,9] for a detailed overview of machine learning features for energy disaggregation.
A more recent approach to estimate appliance usage is to examine the Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) that most consumer electronic appliances produce as identifying signatures . This EMI is measured using a special sensor built at the Ubicomp Lab at the University of Washington as part of Sidhant Gupta's thesis work. The figure below shows an example of EMI captured from a home. The plot is in frequency domain and shows the signatures of various appliances.
The presence or absence of such EMI signatures would ideally tell us when a particular appliance is in use. However, due to the large numbers of appliances in a home, the solution is not straightforward. Machine learning is required not only to make an inference about the appliance class given a particular signature, but probabilistic models are needed that take into account, for example, human appliance usage patterns (think using coffee machine and toaster in morning vs. lights in evening), weather patterns (very unlikely that AC came on during winters), and appliance electrical model. The signature of an appliance can also drift or vary over time due to operating conditions and the mode in which they are used (for instance, a washing machine has many modes). We encourage participants to review  to better understand the use of EMI for electrical appliance use detection and classification.
Videos and Slides
Here are a few lab quality videos that may helo you grasp the big picture:
Video of the signal: http://youtu.be/o-SqO8y8XUA
Video of the technology applied to energy monitoring: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcPI1Cp0VZI
Slides from conference talk for ElectriSense can be accessed here: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~sidhant/slides/ElectriSense_PDF.pdf
1. Berges, M., Goldman, E., Matthews, H.S., and Soibelman, L. Training Load Monitoring Algorithms on Highly Sub-Metered Home Electricity Consumption Data. Tsinghua Science & Technology 13, Supple, 0 (2008), 406–411.
2. Carrie Armel, K., Gupta, A., Shrimali, G., and Albert, A. Is disaggregation the holy grail of energy efficiency? The case of electricity. Energy Policy 52, (2012), 213–234.
3. Froehlich, J., Larson, E., Gupta, S., Cohn, G., Reynolds, M., and Patel, S. Disaggregated End-Use Energy Sensing for the Smart Grid. IEEE Pervasive Computing 10, 1 (2011), 28–39.
4. Gupta, S., Reynolds, M., and Patel, S. ElectriSense: Single-Point Sensing Using EMI for Electrical Event Detection and Classification in the home. Ubicomp 2010, (2010).
5. Hart, G. Nonintrusive appliance load monitoring. Proceedings of the IEEE, (1992).
6. Laughman, C., Lee, K., and Cox, R. Power signature analysis. IEEE Power and Energy, april 2003 (2003).
7. Leeb, S.B., Shaw, S.R., and Kirtley, J.L. Transient Event Detection in Spectral Envelope Estimates. IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery 10, 3 (1995), 1200–1210.
8. Norford, L.K. and Leeb, S.B. Non-intrusive electrical load monitoring in commercial buildings based on steady-state and transient load-detection algorithms. Energy and Buildings 24, 1 (1996), 51–64.
9. Zeifman, M., Ph, D., and Roth, K. Non-Intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring ( NIALM ): Review and Outlook * Fraunhofer : A Leading Force in Applied R & D. Consumer Electronics, January (2011).
Started: 2:02 am, Tuesday 2 July 2013 UTC
Ended: 11:59 pm, Wednesday 30 October 2013 UTC (120 total days)
Points: this competition awarded standard ranking points
Tiers: this competition counted towards tiers