Energy Monitoring and Low-Power Sensing in the Home
Professor Patel will describe work on a new generation of electricity, water, and natural gas measurement systems that are low-cost, easy-to-install, and, most importantly, capable of providing disaggregated data on consumption down to the individual appliance or device from single sensing points. The vision is to provide high granularity resource sensing systems for homes and businesses that will fundamentally transform how end uses of electricity, water, and natural gas are understood, studied and, ultimately, consumed. All three systems share a common approach: they monitor side-effects of resource usage that manifest throughout a home's internal electricity, plumbing, or gas infrastructure. He will alsodescribe a new approach to low-power wireless sensing in the home that uses the power lines as a receiving antenna. The hardware and software challenges as well as the details of these solutions will be discussed.
Dr. Shwetak N. Patel is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington. His research interests are in the areas of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, Sensor-enabled Embedded Systems, and User Interface Software and Technology. He is particularly interested in developing easy-to-deploy sensing technologies and approaches for location and activity recognition applications. Dr. Patel was also a founder of Zensi, Inc., a demand side energy monitoring solutions provider, which was acquired by Belkin, Inc in 2010. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008 and B.S. in Computer Science in 2003. Dr. Patel was a TR-35 award recipient in 2009 for his workon single-point energy monitoring techniques, was named top innovator of the year by Seattle Business Magazine, and Newsmaker of the year by Seattle Business Journal in 2010. His past work was honored by the New York Times as a top technology of the year in 2005.