1st International Workshop on
Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

May 7th, 2012 (Monday)
Bombardier Smart Infrastructure Collaboration Center (Hamerschlag Hall)

Speakers

This page will be updated with speaker information as the workshop date approaches.

Confirmed speakers:

Michael Zeifman, Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE)
Dr. Michael Zeifman leads home energy monitoring and modeling work at the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE), based in Cambridge, MA. CSE is part of the international applied research network spearheaded by Germany's Fraunhofer Society. Prior to joining Fraunhofer CSE, Michael worked in a broadly-defined area of modeling and simulation for more than fifteen years. He has served as a principal investigator on numerous R&D; projects funded either by government (NASA, Department of Defense, NSF, DHS) or industry (FM Global, ERC, NYSearch). He has authored about 50 peer-reviewed scientific and technical papers. Michael received his undergraduate degree in Engineering Physics from St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University, Russia, and a M.Sc. in Quality Control and a Ph.D. in Physical Reliability from Technion – Israeli Institute of Technology. Dr. Zeifman is a Senior Member of both IEEE and AIAA.

Kevin Ashton, Belkin International, Inc.
Kevin Ashton is General Manager at Belkin International, Inc. in charge of developing and commercializing Non-Instrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) technologies for electricity, water and natural gas. He also led the development of Belkin's "Conserve" energy efficiency consumer products, and its new "WeMo" home automation platform. Kevin was previously co-founder and CEO of Zensi, an NILM start up acquired by Belkin 2010. He has also been Vice President Marketing at EnerNOC, a Boston-based clean tech company and was co-founder and Executive Director of MIT's Auto-ID Center, which developed standards for low cost RFID and sensor networks.

Scott May, PlotWatt
Scott May develops algorithms for PlotWatt. Scott's background includes signal processing, constructive simulation, and systems analysis. Prior to joining PlotWatt, Scott worked on modeling and simulation of advanced sensor concepts for the DoD, system identification of earthquake-damaged buildings from ambient vibrations, and creating new welding waveforms for joining titanium plate. Scott received BS and MS in Civil Engineering from Johns Hopkins and a PhD in Engineering from Caltech.

Sidhant Gupta, University of Washington
Sidhant Gupta is a third year PhD student at the University of Washington's CSE department specializing in Ubiquitous Computing. His current research focuses on developing novel sensing technologies and supporting software for the home that use minimal sensors, are low cost and easy to deploy. A core part of his work is in developing sensing techniques and machine learning algorithms that leverage high frequency noise produced by modern consumer electronics for energy disaggregation. He received his Masters from Georgia Tech in 2009 and was recently named a technology disrupter in the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work on sustainability sensing.

Zico Kolter, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Zico Kolter is a postdoctoral fellow at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. His work focuses on sustainable energy domains, and the core challenges of machine learning, optimization, and control that arise in this area. Applications he has worked on include approximate inference algorithms and sparse coding for electrical energy disaggregation and reinforcement learning for wind turbine control. He is an NSF Computing Innovations Fellow, and received his Ph.D. in 2010 from Stanford University.

Mario Berges, Carnegie Mellon University
Mario Berges is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at CMU. His research interests include infrastructure monitoring, building energy management, building technologies, machine learning for signal processing and sensor networks. He is the faculty co-director of the IBM Smart Infrastructure Analytics Laboratory at CMU. He received his B.Sc. in 2004 from the Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic; and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2007 and 2010, respectively, both from Carnegie Mellon University.