CAREER: New Systems and Tools for Residential Sustainability Sensing

能源和资源监测促进可持续性作为一项新出现的全球挑战，已引起极大关注。住宅能源和水消费是最大和最不了解的消费领域之一，占美国能源消费的28%和美国饮用水消费的56%。解决我们能源和水危机的战略显然需要一种超越技术的多方面办法。然而，为了更全面地了解家庭能源消耗，计算技术在收集、分析和呈现数据方面发挥着关键作用，以回答科学界提出的重要可持续性问题。过去的工作表明，通过适当的家用电器使用数据反馈，家庭可持续节能10-15%，但需要安装复杂的传感器。在实际部署感测技术以大规模收集这些相关数据方面仍然存在巨大挑战。当前的感测方法仍处于起步阶段，并且仅限于小型、孤立的部署，并且许多现有的感测方法往往被认为是突兀的并且难以安装。此外，没有关于能源和水使用的综合公共数据集以及原始传感器数据，研究人员无法构建和比较新的分析工具和方法，因此参与此类工作的能力仅限于少数群体，他们可以通过自己的小型部署访问这些专有信息。该研究项目的目标是通过开发一个完整的家庭用电和水的传感和分析平台，实现传感技术的民主化，以实现可持续发展。学术价值：该研究将在科学界提出的两个重大挑战方面取得进展：1）加速普及计算技术，提高生活质量; 2）减少住宅能源和水的消耗。这项工作涉及使用少量传感器来感测家庭用电和用水的新方法。这包括首次全面探索实用的水传感和分析技术，提供有关用水的高度颗粒信息，并结合电力和水传感器流以改进分类。这项研究的重点是设计，开发和评估（硬件和软件）的新的，易于安装，具有成本效益的传感解决方案。从这项研究中产生的见解和文物有价值的可持续性以外的其他应用，如老年人护理，在家庭康复，慢性病management.Broader的影响：在这项研究中提出的平台有直接的影响日益重视能源和可持续性的联邦和地方政府。拟议技术的潜在部署便利性将使其成为环境研究人员和最终房主的理想技术，这些房主目前对其实际能源和水资源使用情况知之甚少。本研究收集的综合能源和水数据集将成为该领域其他人创建自己的分析方法的推动者。更广泛地说，这些数据将使科学家、工程师和工业界能够回答有关能源和水的基本问题。这项研究的广泛影响的潜力，再加上无处不在的计算固有的跨学科性质与教育计划相结合，旨在激发高中生和本科生追求计算和工程一般的职业生涯。他们将了解跨学科的研究机会，并通过参与主要研究者的活动。研究实验室在附近吗？可持续发展思想？新的研究生课程将旨在教育年轻的研究人员关于无处不在的计算的相关研究课题，并学习构建现实世界应用所需的新的先进原型技术。新的K-12学习活动和项目也将围绕可持续性发展。

Energy and resource monitoring for sustainability has garnered significant attention as an emerging global challenge. Residential energy and water consumption is one of the largest and least understood areas of consumption and is responsible for 28% of US energy consumption and 56% of US drinking water consumption. Strategies for addressing our energy and water crisis clearly require a multifaceted approach that transcends technology. However, for developing a more complete understanding of energy consumption in the home, computing technology plays a critical role in the collection, analysis, and presentation of data to answer important sustainability questions by the scientific community. Past work has demonstrated sustained energy savings of 10-15% in the home with the appropriate feedback of appliance-level usage data, but required complex sensor installations. A great challenge still remains in practically deploying sensing technologies to gather this relevant data at a large scale.Current sensing methods remain in their infancy and are limited to small, isolated deployments, and many existing sensing approaches tend to be deemed obtrusive and difficult to install. In addition, no comprehensive public dataset on energy and water use and raw sensor data exists for researchers to build and compare new analytic tools and methods, thus limiting the ability to participate in this kind of work to a small number of groups who have access to this proprietary information through their own small deployments. The goal of this multi-year research project is to democratize sensing for sustainability by developing a complete electricity and water sensing and analytics platform for homes.Intellectual Merit: This research will make progress on two grand challenges posed by the scientific community: 1) accelerated deployment of ubiquitous computing technology for improving quality of life and 2) the reduction of residential energy and water consumption. This work involves novel approaches to sensing electricity and water use in the home using a small number of sensors. This includes the first full exploration of practical water sensing and analytic techniques that provide highly granular information on water use and combining electricity and water sensor streams for improved classification. This research focuses on the design, development, and evaluation (both hardware and software) of new, easy-to-install, and cost-effective sensing solutions. The insights and artifacts resulting from this research have merit in other applications beyond sustainability, such as elder care, in-home rehabilitation, and chronic disease management.Broader Impact: The platform proposed in this research has direct implications for the growing focus on the energy and sustainability by both the federal and local governments. The potential ease of deployment for the proposed technology will make this a desirable technology for environmental researchers and ultimately homeowners who currently have little insight into their actual energy and water use. The comprehensive energy and water dataset collected with this research will serve as an enabler for others in this space to create their own analytic approaches. More generally, this data will enable scientists, engineers, and industry to answer foundational questions regarding energy and water. The potential for the broad impact of this research coupled with the inherent interdisciplinary nature of ubiquitous computing integrates with an education plan designed to excite high school students and undergraduates to pursue careers in computing and engineering in general. They will learn about interdisciplinary research opportunities and engage in activities by participating in the primary investigator?s research lab around ?sustainable thinking.? New graduate-level courses will be designed to educate young researchers about relevant research topics in ubiquitous computing and learn new advanced prototyping techniques necessary for building real-world applications. New K-12 learning activities and projects will also be developed around sustainability.