Nigel Gilbert

Jie Jiang, Riccardo Pozza, Nigel Gilbert et al.

There has been increasing interest in deploying IoT devices to study human behaviour in locations such as homes and offices. Such devices can be deployed in a laboratory or `in the wild' in natural environments. The latter allows one to collect behavioural data that is not contaminated by the artificiality of a laboratory experiment. Using IoT devices in ordinary environments also brings the benefits of reduced cost, as compared with lab experiments, and less disturbance to the participants' daily routines which in turn helps with recruiting them into the research. However, in this case, it is essential to have an IoT infrastructure that can be easily and swiftly installed and from which real-time data can be securely and straightforwardly collected. In this paper, we present MakeSense, an IoT testbed that enables real-world experimentation for large scale social research on indoor activities through real-time monitoring and/or situation-aware applications. The testbed features quick setup, flexibility in deployment, the integration of a range of IoT devices, resilience, and scalability. We also present two case studies to demonstrate the use of the testbed, one in homes and one in offices.

Jie Jiang, Qiuqiang Kong, Mark Plumbley et al.

Energy disaggregation, a.k.a. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, aims to separate the energy consumption of individual appliances from the readings of a mains power meter measuring the total energy consumption of, e.g. a whole house. Energy consumption of individual appliances can be useful in many applications, e.g., providing appliance-level feedback to the end users to help them understand their energy consumption and ultimately save energy. Recently, with the availability of large-scale energy consumption datasets, various neural network models such as convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been investigated to solve the energy disaggregation problem. Neural network models can learn complex patterns from large amounts of data and have been shown to outperform the traditional machine learning methods such as variants of hidden Markov models. However, current neural network methods for energy disaggregation are either computational expensive or are not capable of handling long-term dependencies. In this paper, we investigate the application of the recently developed WaveNet models for the task of energy disaggregation. Based on a real-world energy dataset collected from 20 households over two years, we show that WaveNet models outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning methods proposed in the literature for energy disaggregation in terms of both error measures and computational cost. On the basis of energy disaggregation, we then investigate the performance of two deep-learning based frameworks for the task of on/off detection which aims at estimating whether an appliance is in operation or not. Based on the same dataset, we show that for the task of on/off detection the second framework, i.e., directly training a binary classifier, achieves better performance in terms of F1 score.