CENS Technical Seminar Series

Spotlight : Focus on Energy Consumption of Individuals

powerpoint slides

Invited Speaker: Younghun Kim, EE, UCLA
Date: November 2, 2007
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Venue: 4760 Boleter Hall, UCLA

Abstract

We present Spotlight, a novel application that monitors electrical
energy consumption at the individual level. Obtaining reports of
energy consumption at this fine granularity allows identifying new
areas for energy saving and acting upon it in real-time. Spotlight
views appliances as rendering a service to a user and the energy
consumption associated with the appliance as a cost for the service.
Each participating appliance is specified a service range, a physical
vicinity from the appliance within which the user benefits from the
service. Using radio receive strength from user-wearable active RFID
tags, an appliance is able to determine the users in its service
range. In order to make these measurements, each appliance is
instrumented with a power meter and an active RFID tag reader. The
current implementation of Spotlight uses a COTS power meter and MicaZ
motes as active RFID tags and readers.
The Spotlight system is deployed and tested in an experimental setup
with various appliances and users. We evaluate multiple schemes of
accounting energy consumption based on an individual's movement
profile and the appliances' power profile. Our preliminary results
show how the system could detect wasted energy and we discuss
interesting individual behavior that could be interpreted for various
energy optimizations.

Biography

Younghun Kim is a 2nd year Ph. D student under the direction of Mani
B. Srivastava, at NESL, UCLA. He received his M.S. and B.S. in
electrical engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea in
2006 and 2004, respectively. His research interest includes embedded
systems, sensor and actuator networks, optimization and control
theory.