Sadegh Bolouki

Yanbing Mao, Sadegh Bolouki, Emrah Akyol

This paper provides a model to investigate information spreading over cyber-social network of agents communicating with each other. The cyber-social network considered here comprises individuals and news agencies. Each individual holds a belief represented by a scalar. Individuals receive information from news agencies that are closer to their belief, confirmation bias is explicitly incorporated into the model. The proposed dynamics of cyber-social networks is adopted from DeGroot-Friedkin model, where the individual's opinion update mechanism is a convex combination of his innate opinion, his neighbors' opinions at the previous time step (obtained from the social network), and the opinions passed along by news agencies from cyber layer which he follows. The characteristics of the interdependent social and cyber networks are radically different here: the social network relies on trust and hence static while the news agencies are highly dynamic since they are weighted as a function of the distance between an individual state and the state of news agency to account for confirmation bias. The conditions for convergence of the aforementioned dynamics to a unique equilibrium are characterized. The estimation and exact computation of the steady-state values under non-linear and linear state-dependent weight functions are provided. Finally, the impact of polarization in the opinions of news agencies on the public opinion evolution is numerically analyzed in the context of the well-known Krackhardt's advice network.

Farid Rajabali, Roland Malhame, Sadegh Bolouki

Mean field game equilibria are predicated on the assumption of immediate pairwise interactions within a population of homogeneous agents with asymptotically vanishing influence as population size increases. However, in many real-world cases, agents receive population-level information with a delay. In this paper, we characterize agent best responses under an information exchange structure whereby agents observe the empirical mean state only at discrete time instants with some delay. Sufficient conditions are presented for the existence of a Nash equilibrium within a finite population of agents, and the cost increase due to delayed discrete empirical mean observations relative to zero-latency discrete observations and continuous global-state observations is also evaluated.

Elnaz Azizi, Mohammad T H Beheshti, Sadegh Bolouki

A promising approach toward efficient energy management is non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), that is to extract the consumption profiles of appliances within a residence by analyzing the aggregated consumption signal. Among efficient NILM methods are event-based algorithms in which events of the aggregated signal are detected and classified in accordance with the appliances causing them. The large number of appliances and the presence of appliances with close consumption values are known to limit the performance of event-based NILM methods. To tackle these challenges, one could enhance the feature space which in turn results in extra hardware costs, installation complexity, and concerns regarding the consumer's comfort and privacy. This has led to the emergence of an alternative approach, namely semi-intrusive load monitoring (SILM), where appliances are partitioned into blocks and the consumption of each block is monitored via separate power meters. While a greater number of meters can result in more accurate disaggregation, it increases the monetary cost of load monitoring, indicating a trade-off that represents an important gap in this field. In this paper, we take a comprehensive approach to close this gap by establishing a so-called notion of "disaggregation difficulty metric (DDM)," which quantifies how difficult it is to monitor the events of any given group of appliances based on both their power values and the consumer's usage behavior. Thus, DDM in essence quantifies how much is expected to be gained in terms of disaggregation accuracy of a generic event-based algorithm by installing meters on the blocks of any partition of the appliances. Experimental results based on the REDD dataset illustrate the practicality of the proposed approach in addressing the aforementioned trade-off.

Mohammad-Mehdi Keramati, Elnaz Azizi, Hamidreza Momeni et al.

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) as the process of extracting the usage pattern of appliances from the aggregated power signal is among successful approaches aiding residential energy management. In recent years, high volume datasets on power profiles have become available, which has helped make classification methods employed for the NILM purpose more effective and more accurate. However, the presence of multi-mode appliances and appliances with close power values have remained influential in worsening the computational complexity and diminishing the accuracy of these algorithms. To tackle these challenges, we propose an event-based classification process, in the first phase of which the $K$-nearest neighbors method, as a fast classification technique, is employed to extract power signals of appliances with exclusive non-overlapping power values. Then, two deep learning models, which consider the water consumption of some appliances as a novel signature in the network, are utilized to distinguish between appliances with overlapping power values. In addition to power disaggregation, the proposed process as well extracts the water consumption profiles of specific appliances. To illustrate the proposed process and validate its efficiency, seven appliances of the AMPds are considered, with the numerical classification results showing marked improvement with respect to the existing classification-based NILM techniques.