The Smart* project seeks to optimize energy consumption in homes, with specific attention to modern ‘smart homes’ and the new opportunities made available by such homes. A corecomponent of the project is several heavily-instrumented smart homes that provide us with a testbed to gather real-life data and experiment with new techniques and algorithms to improve home energy efficiency. To facilitate further research on sustainability in smart homes, we have also released a significant subset of our data, which is available at this page.
In the course of the Smart* project, we have investigated a wide range of topics involving the design, deployment, and efficient use of smart homes for sustainability, such as:
- Whole-House Monitoring: High-fidelity data collection at scale within homes, including electrical, environmental, and operation data
- Smart Appliance Control: Automatically modifying the patterns of energy usage in home devices to reduce costs and improve overall efficiency
- Renewable Energy Use: Maximizing the benefits of renewable energy resources to offset power drawn from the electrical grid
Data and Software Releases
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UMass Smart* Home Data Set This data set includes a variety of traces from three separate smart homes. These traces are available from our trace repository.
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UMass Smart* Microgrid Data Set This data set includes electrical data from over 400 homes. These traces are also available from our trace repository.
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Smart* Software Tools These tools include utilities to facilitate data collection using commodity sensors. Source code is available from our software repository.
Publications
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NILM Redux: The Case for Emphasizing Applications over Accuracy
Sean Barker, Sandeep Kalra, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy.
Proceedings of the Second NILM workshop (NILM 2014), Austin, TX, June 2014.
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Combined Heat and Privacy: Preventing Occupancy Detection from Smart Meters
Dong Chen, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, and Jeannie Albrecht.
Proceedings of IEEE PerCom, Budapest, Hungary, March 2014
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Non-Intrusive Occupancy Monitoring using Smart Meters
Dong Chen, Sean Barker, Adarsh Subbaswamy, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy.
Proceedings of ACM BuildSys 2013, Rome, Italy, November 2013.
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Empirical Characterization and Modeling of Electrical Loads in Smart Homes
Sean Barker, Sandeep Kalra, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy.
Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Green Computing Conference (IGCC 2013), Arlington, VA, June 2013.
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Scaling Distributed Energy Storage for Grid Peak Reduction
Aditya Mishra, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, and Ting Zhu.
Proceedings of the 4th ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (eEnergy 2013), Berkeley, CA, May 2013.
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*Smart: An Open Data Set and Tools for Enabling Research in Sustainable Homes**
Sean Barker, Aditya Mishra, David Irwin, Emmanuel Cecchet, Prashant Shenoy, and Jeannie Albrecht.
Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Data Mining Applications in Sustainability (SustKDD 2012), Beijing, China, August 2012.
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SmartCharge: Cutting the Electricity Bill in Smart Homes with Energy Storage
Aditya Mishra, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, Jim Kurose, and Ting Zhu.
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Future Energy Systems (e-Energy 2012), Madrid, Spain, May 2012.
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SmartCap: Flattening Peak Electricity Demand in Smart Homes
Sean Barker, Aditya Mishra, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, and Jeannie Albrecht.
Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2012), Lugano, Switzerland, March 2012.
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Exploiting Home Automation Protocols for Load Monitoring in Smart Buildings
David Irwin, Anthony Wu, Sean Barker, Aditya Mishra, Prashant Shenoy, and Jeannie Albrecht.
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Buildings (BuildSys 2011), Seattle, WA, November 2011.
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The Case for Efficient Renewable Energy Management for Smart Homes
Ting Zhu, Aditya Mishra, David Irwin, Navin Sharma, Prashant Shenoy, and Don Towsley.
Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems for Energy-Efficiency in Buildings (BuildSys 2011), Seattle, WA, November 2011.
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