Seminars

This talk discusses past efforts on optimizing industrial central energy plants and juxtaposes this work against against recent results on integrating residential distributed energy resources (DERs) into grid operations to enable reliable grid operation under extreme penetrations of renewables. The focus of the talk will be on Packetized Energy Management (PEM) for aggregating and coordinating DERs, such as electric water heaters, electric vehicles, and electric battery storage. PEM leverages key tools from communication systems that enable billions of people to access the internet and…

Analyzing observations of the physical world can be a messy process. But the rise of intelligent and connected sensors to measure energy consumption, air quality, ocean temperatures, urban noises, and any number of other changes is allowing us to study our urban environment and take actions like never before. In this talk, I will discuss several recent projects that use intelligent sensor systems and data analytics to better understand the physical world and improve our daily lives. In one, we create ePrints -- a system that tracks each occupant’s personal share of energy use, or “energy…

Application-level energy optimization has emerged as an important aspect of computer system energy management. Languages and frameworks that treat applications as a "white box" for program energy behavior, and energy as a first-class program entity, enjoy more powerful optimizations and stronger guarantees. In this talk, we introduce Ent, a programming language that encourages both a proactive and adaptive approach to energy management. On the proactive side, objects are labeled with modes that represent an object's expected energy behavior, encouraging programmers to reason about how…

Click here for talk and project descriptions. 

More info:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kurt/noria-cool-redefined/description

https://www.kapsulair.com/

We are currently witnessing an increasing integration of energy and transportation, which, coupled with human interactions, is giving rise to a new level of complexity in the next generation of transportation systems. Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) provide the most intriguing and promising opportunity for enabling users to better monitor transportation network conditions and make better operating decisions to reduce energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, travel delays and improve safety. While several studies have shown the benefits of…