CAREER: New Systems and Tools for Residential Sustainability Sensing

能源和资源可持续监测作为一项新兴的全球挑战引起了极大的关注。居民能源和水消费是最大也是最不为人所知的消费领域之一，占美国能源消费的28%，占美国饮用水消费的56%。解决我们的能源和水危机的战略显然需要超越技术的多方面方法。然而，为了更全面地了解家庭的能源消耗，计算技术在收集、分析和呈现数据以回答科学界重要的可持续发展问题方面发挥着关键作用。过去的研究表明，通过对家用电器级别的使用数据进行适当的反馈，可以在家庭中持续节省10%-15%的能源，但需要安装复杂的传感器。在实际部署传感技术以大规模收集这些相关数据方面仍然存在巨大的挑战。当前的传感方法仍处于起步阶段，仅限于小规模、孤立的部署，许多现有的传感方法往往被认为是突出的和难以安装的。此外，没有关于能源和水使用以及原始传感器数据的全面公共数据集，研究人员可以构建和比较新的分析工具和方法，从而将参与这类工作的能力限制在能够通过自己的小型部署访问这些专有信息的少数群体。这个多年研究项目的目标是通过开发一个完整的家庭水电传感和分析平台来实现可持续发展的传感民主化。智力价值：这项研究将在科学界提出的两个重大挑战上取得进展：1)加速部署泛在计算技术以提高生活质量，2)减少住宅能源和水资源消耗。这项工作涉及到使用少量传感器来感知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，提供关于水使用的高度颗粒状信息，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)新的、易于安装和具有成本效益的传感解决方案。这项研究产生的洞察力和人工制品在可持续发展之外的其他应用中也有价值，如老年人护理、家庭康复和慢性病管理。广泛的影响：本研究中提出的平台对联邦和地方政府日益关注的能源和可持续发展具有直接影响。拟议中的技术可能易于部署，这将使这项技术成为环境研究人员乃至房主的理想技术，他们目前对自己的实际能源和水使用情况知之甚少。这项研究收集的全面的能源和水数据集将为该领域的其他人创建自己的分析方法提供支持。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，加上无处不在的计算固有的跨学科性质，与旨在刺激高中生和本科生在计算机和工程领域追求职业生涯的教育计划相结合。他们将通过参加首席研究员S围绕可持续思维的研究实验室，了解跨学科的研究机会并参与活动。新的研究生水平的课程将被设计来教育年轻的研究人员关于普适计算的相关研究主题，并学习构建现实世界应用程序所必需的新的先进原型技术。还将围绕可持续发展制定新的K-12学习活动和项目。

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.