During the last few weeks, with all the travels, conferences and exposure to other people, I have been ruminating a couple of ideas about the guiding principles that I think should be followed when conducting engineering research. Perhaps they apply to all types of research, or even to life in general. I don’t know. I do know that I would like them to guide my work.

As with almost any profession in life, in research it is easy to replace or confuse self-perceived success with success as perceived by others.  In other words, sometimes we loose sight of what initially drove us to this profession and instead focus on ensuring we are seen as successful by our peers. This is perhaps the observation that got me thinking during these past few weeks. I have clearly fallen for this trap and wanted to find a way to prevent this from happening.

The thoughts have been piling up and, to make sense of what is going on in my head, I decided to spend a few minutes (now an hour) writing down a short list of these guiding principles; a credo of sorts. It is still incomplete, but who knows if it will ever be complete. So without further ado, here is the result:
[click to continue…]

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Last revised on 2012/06/26

As if it were not enough, besides SustKDD 2012 and the 1st NILM Workshop this year I will be helping to organize another two events that could be of interest to those of you who are working on energy efficiency in buildings. Here are the details:

BuildSys 2012

To be held at Toronto, Canada

Important Dates:

• Paper submission deadline: 07/30/2012
• Workshop Date: 11/06/2012

Special Issue on ASCE’s Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering

Co-guest editing with John Taylor from Virginia Tech.

Important Dates:

• Proposals due by: 07/31/2012
• Full paper due by: 11/01/2012

For more information, follow these links:

• BuildSys 2012
• ASCE’s JCCE Special Issue

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The semester has still not come to an end and yet the summer travel season has apparently begun. I have been in Dallas since yesterday, attending a workshop on load shape libraries and customer load insights arranged by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Tomorrow (more like in a few hours) I leave to New York to participate in a panel as part of BuildingsNY. Then there is a trip to the Wolf Creek Dam in a few weeks, and more trips after. All in all, I will only be in Pittsburgh for about 14 days this month. OK, enough about my travel schedule.

Today during the workshop I jotted down a few simple and unprocessed ideas/observations that I would like to share. It is always interesting to participate in conversations with industry because the disconnect between academic research and industry problems becomes evident very quickly. Most of these disconnects are due to the fact that the answers being sought by academia will only become useful later, but often times these answers are in response to problems that do not even exist and will likely never exist; and that is a big problem. The observations I made today are not necessarily under this category, however:

• There is a need to quantify the benefits of load research. Although there are no hard numbers, the benefits of customer research are believed to be:
• The possibility of making informed decisions to defer large capital investments.
• Informing policy and regulation with solid evidence.
• Billing dispute resolution
• Fraud detection
• Identifying causes of high bills
• Better customer service
• Two-way communication with end-use loads for verification of load dispatch is not likely to happen, even though verification is really important for demand-side management programs.
• It could be useful to learn more about the techniques used in Conditional Demand Analysis.
• Load researchers do not think of sub-cycle statistics (e.g., harmonics) or other high-frequency information when talking about load research. They mostly think about hourly active power values.
• Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring is alive and well, as I had thought.

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