Illinois-arcs, Author at Illinois Advanced Research Center at Singapore

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) has awarded funding for three new research projects to be conducted at ADSC’s Fusionopolis research center. The projects were chosen based on their intellectual merit, strong connections with Singaporean collaborators, and potential commercial impact for Singapore and beyond. The approved research will be part of the Human Sixth Sense Project (HSSP), which is funded by Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

Illinois graduate and ADSC senior research scientist Bernard Ghanem and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) professor Narendra Ahuja of Illinois will receive grant funds for their “Semantic Analysis of Sports Video” research project. Professor Pierre Moulin (ECE, Illinois) and researcher Bing Bing Ni (ADSC) were awarded funds for their study of “Emerging Multimodal-Data Analytics”. Finally, professor Zbigniew Kalbarczyk (Illinois), professor David Nicol (ECE, Illinois), distinguished scientist David Yau (ADSC), and ECE professor and Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) director William H. Sanders (Illinois) will receive funding for their study of “Integrative Security Assessment of Smart Grid Cyber Infrastructure.”

Ghanem and Ahuja’s “Semantic Analysis of Sports Video” project will investigate and develop a computational framework suitable for the semantic analysis of complex activities and interactions inherent to the sports domain. The research plans to create ways to recognize and detect important events and activities in videos, such as scoring of a soccer goal or running of a play in football, by recognizing patterns of movement. Video activity analysis has been established in security surveillance and military applications, but there have been few opportunities for it in the sports world. The ability to browse and query large collections of sports video automatically or semi-automatically will impact coaches and sports analysts, sports broadcasting companies, and sports fans, making it easier to incorporate video streaming quickly into broadcasts or advertising.

Moulin and Ni’s “Emerging Multimodal-Data Analytics” research project aims to create new algorithms and prototype systems for depth and color video data, using visual analytics to detect, classify, and recognize events and actions in video. This research could be applied to the field of rehabilitation or athletics by having a video-based system capture, analyze, and give feedback on the movement of a patient or athlete. Additionally, the ability to recognize movement of the human body could be important to video surveillance teams attempting to watch for people fighting, crowds gathering, or someone dropping an unattended item.

The researchers with the “Integrative Security Assessment of Smart Grid Cyber Infrastructure” project believe that different types of security assessments should be applied at different times in the design, implementation, and operation cycles of constructing a smart grid information infrastructure. They want to develop methods for describing different types of security evidence and use that information to create a template for assessing a system’s security. This research will make it possible to obtain integrated security metrics for complex systems and guide the researchers as they develop prototypes that have the potential for commercialization in Singapore and other parts of Asia. It will also serve as a guideline for system development firms in developing similar “smart grid” projects.

The HSSP grant now funds eleven projects, including the latest three awards. ADSC funds for the three new projects were awarded by the Technical Review Panel (TRP) and received final approvals at the Program Management Steering Committee (PMSC) meeting held August 29 in Singapore. The PMSC provides general oversight of the HSSP grant, reviewing research progress and authorizing the decisions of the TRP. The TRP is composed of three University of Illinois faculty and three Singaporean academics. William H. Sanders and Chua Kee Chaing (an ECE professor at the National University of Singapore) serve as co-chairs; the other members include Rob Rutenbar (head of the department of Computer Science at Illinois), Andreas Cangellaris (head of ECE at Illinois),Terence Hung Gih Guang (deputy executive director of Singapore’s Institute of High Performance Computing), and Geok Leng Tan (deputy executive director of Singapore’s Science and Engineering Research Council).

ADSC is a research facility in Singapore for faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Its research focuses on transforming the way people and organizations use and interact with information technology.

Almost every athlete knows the importance of “watching tape.” Videotaping has been an essential training tool for coaches and athletes for decades; however, recent developments in computer vision research at the Advanced Digital Sciences Center in Singapore by Bernard Ghanem and Narendra Ahuja could revolutionize the way coaches train athletes.

Ghanem and Ahuja’s research looks at human actions and interactions in video and creates a way to analyze these complex movements and patterns.

“Our system will help coaches understand the large numbers of video clips of sports they have,” explains Ahuja, a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Coaches could more speedily and reliably extract statistics of different sports events, such as fumbles and goals.”

Additionally, their research will allow coaches to interpret those statistics across many plays. Ahuja adds that coaches could use their system to understand the “conditions under which a quarterback adopts a certain play strategy, [or] decipher any regular patterns in the way a team responds to a certain play by another team and the weaknesses of specific players under specific play settings.”

Using video registration, a coach could follow the trajectory of a player, as shown in this example from an American football game. The image on the left shows players’ locations using colored boxes; after registering each video frame, the coach could see the players’ respective trajectories on the right.

There are benefits for individual players in their training routines, as well. Ahuja points out that “a player could quickly access a summary of his own performance over a period and use it to focus on aspects that he needs to modify.”

Ghanem and Ahuja’s research is based upon the concept of video registration, which is the ability to take a video and create a map or coordinate system of the changing scenes. For example, if there are three different views of a school classroom, it’s possible to register the photos together to create one complete view of the room. Since videos are simply a sequence of still images, video registration is the process of determining how video images fit together into a bigger scene.

According to Ahuja, registration is a fundamental problem in computer vision that is central to many capabilities, such as stereo reconstruction analysis, multi-view understanding, and object recognition.

While the task of video registration is not new in the field of computer vision, the current standard method, which has been used for at least five years, assumes the scene being captured is not dynamic, meaning there is not a lot of movement in the scene. However, in real life, videos are often taken of highly dynamic scenes from cameras that are panning, tilting, or zooming.

“To analyze the motion of an object, you need to separate out the motion of the camera,” said Ghanem, a Senior Research Scientist at ADSC and a graduate of the University of Illinois with a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering.”You have to make sure that any motion in the video is from the object alone. There can be no camera movement whatsoever.”

Ghanem and Ahuja, along with their team of five other researchers and two interns, have been using video registration to separate the motion of a moving object in a video from the apparent movement due to the pan, tilt, or zoom of a camera. Ghanem says this step is fundamental and must be accomplished before any further processing of the video, such as tracking the movement of a specific person, can be done.

“By doing that, we can render a video where the only motion is object motion,” Ghanem said. “Only then can you do reliable tracking.”

Another problem with the standard technique is that it detects points and lines in a video and matches them with similar images, using a random sampling method to choose these matches. A method called RANSAC (Random Sampling Consensus) is used to avoid errors in detections. Unfortunately, this method is strict in its assumptions, leading to more errors, especially when the scene is dynamic. For example, this method assumes they know the number of errors on average to expect for each video.

Ghanem and Ahuja’s technique assumes there will be a sparse number of errors, but makes no conclusions as to how many. This relaxed assumption makes their new method more flexible and therefore more accurate.

Using recent mathematical developments in the fields of sparse and low-rank representation, in addition to new algorithms and efficient computational techniques, the group created a video registration system that outperforms the accuracy of the current method by at least 8 percent and sometimes up to 30 percent. Additionally, while their registration method is much more complicated to solve, Ghanem and Ahuja have put in place techniques and theoretical technology that can solve complicated problems efficiently. They see themselves yielding results faster than the standard method in the near future as their method is optimized.

“Right now, we’re just outperforming [the standard], but we’re close to their speed,” Ghanem said. “This is one of the challenges behind making sparse and low-rank representation prominent in the field. If you don’t have an efficient algorithm, it’s not going to be widely used in computer vision.”

The application of the technology could be seen in the video room of any college football team. The coach is watching tape of the latest game and wants to know whether the players on his defense are keeping equal distances between each other on a punt return. Football players want to maintain a gap between them in order to cover as much of the field as possible. Using Ghanem and Ahuja’s new program, the coach would be able to track players and show the trajectories they are running to see if they are maintaining the gap.

“In football, it’s very important to know where everyone is at all times and where they are in respect to each other,” Ghanem said. “It’s good for coaches to see the patterns of their team and what other patterns other teams have and to be able to automatically discover these patterns.”

Another use of the program would be if a coach wants to compare a formation his team runs to a similar formation that another team runs. Using a group of videos, the program would be able to locate and analyze that particular formation for a coach.

Ghanem and Ahuja also plan to add other attractive applications to the program as it progresses. One example is the ability to create a 3D world where the camera would be used to visualize what it would see from different places on the field. Even if the initial video was taken from the stands, the program would be able to generate an abstract video of the same play from an end-zone view or the view of a particular player.

“We can synthesize what the camera would see if the camera were on the field, or what a quarterback would be seeing at that particular time,” Ghanem said. “This video is similar to what you would see if you were on the field or in the environment.”

So instead of teaching athletes how to handle different formations using video from above, this will assist coaches in showing the players what they should expect to see when running the play on the field. They hope this will help solve the problem of a player seeing a video from the sideline and then having difficulty knowing how to apply himself to the play when he gets out on the field.

While Ghanem and Ahuja are focusing the application of their research in sports domain, the technology could be applied to any moving camera or in any application where tracking people and analyzing their patterns would be beneficial. For example, it could be used by a video surveillance team in an airport or for a large supermarket that wants to track customer tendencies to optimize product placement.

“Since the video registration and tracking modules that we are developing are general, there are many applications outside of the realm of sports,” Ghanem said. “…The tracking and registration results can be used to discover patterns in people’s movements and tendencies anywhere.”

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center is a Singapore-based research center for faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ADSC focuses on breakthrough innovations information technology.

ARISE researchers recently demonstrated their data mining technology to the public at the Institute for Infocomm Research’s (I2R) TechFest’11.

ARISE, which stands for Augmented Reality Information Search Engine, is a project led by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science professor Kevin Chang. The research takes place at Illinois’ Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) in Singapore and is funded by Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

The ARISE project aims to bridge the gap between the virtual Internet world and the real world by creating a search tool that will enhance real world experiences with information found on the Web. For example, if a student is curious to see if the new Indian restaurant in town serves his favorite Tandoori Chicken dish, the technology will scour the Web for mentions of the restaurant from Web pages, blogs or reviews. The information is then extracted and organized into a concise and readable format. The student could then check the price of the dish, read reviews about the restaurant or possibly find the recipe the restaurant uses for their Tandoori Chicken.

I2R’s TechFest, which was held in August, is an annual event to showcase the latest innovations at I2R. I2R Research Scientist Hady Lauw staffed the two-day exhibition along with ADSC researchers Ardian Poernomo, Byung-Won On, and Phuong Nguyen. Ryan Rho, an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Illinois, also contributed in developing the exhibit. A short demonstration of the technology was given to any visitor who stopped by the ARISE booth.

“We aim to have ARISE eventually transition from the lab to the real world,” Chang said. “Being at TechFest was an opportunity to speak about our vision for the research and to get a sense if it would be well-received by others.”

While the technology is still in development, the booth included a live demonstration on an iPad, featuring an application for a local restaurant search, to help bring a sense of realism to the technology. Embedded in the application was the ARISE technology for summarizing information about real-life entities from the Web.

“What we were showing was a prototype for restaurant search, to showcase our vision for the research,” Chang said. “We’re still working on the key research challenges, to increase the information quality, as well as to generalize it to other types of entities such as people. We’re probably still at least a year or two out from taking some part of the research to the real world.”

ARISE’s key technologies include finding the information about entities on the Web, integrating the information in a single place and extracting aspects from unstructured text information. The key difference between a typical search engine and ARISE is that ARISE is organized by entities, rather than pages. For example, Google users type in a query and get a list of Web pages. According to Lauw, these are tedious to search through and glean information from. With ARISE, users are shown entities based on their geo-location and information is extracted from the Web about that entity, such as a restaurant, school, business, or person. The information is then organized into a single place, such as an iPad application, and users can find the information on a single page, rather than browsing through multiple Web pages.

“At the app level, probably the experience is similar to existing apps,” Lauw said. “The really hard stuff is at the backend, going out to the Web to find relevant information, integrating and putting them in a unified form and structuring and organizing the information.”

While ARISE may sound like just another iPad application, according to Lauw, it is different in that ARISE looks for more information than just the name, hours, phone number, and prices of a certain entity.

“We realize that there’s a lot more information on the Web about entities, beyond just phone numbers and the like,” he said. “Especially, there is so much content embedded inside reviews. For example, what people say about different aspects, such as ambience, food, dessert, service, price. One of our key objectives is to extract these aspects from reviews, so as to present a summary of the reviews to the users.”

The first time ARISE was presented to the public was at the Singapore Science Festival in July, which focused on science education, and many attendees were students and families with school children. The TechFest drew in industry leaders and professionals, as well as visitors from local educational institutions, which opened up a wider audience for ARISE.

Chang said TechFest gave the ARISE technology increased exposure and visibility and they gleaned positive feedback from the public about their vision. The process also challenged the ARISE team to pull all their information and technology together into a coherent whole that was presentable to the public.

“We saw this as an occasion to showcase our technology, to gain some feedback and to get a sense of whether it would be well-received by the public at large,” Lauw said. “It was also a good chance to seek out potential industrial interests.”

For more information about ARISE, visit http://arise.adsc.com.sg.

The Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) hosted a Demo Day on November 19, 2011 for alumni of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign currently living in Singapore. The Demo Day highlighted the technological and scientific advances ADSC researchers have been making with demonstrations of many of the applications derived from their research.

The event began with breakfast and a question-and-answer session with special guest Illinois alumnus Eric Bina, co-creator of Mosaic. The alumni were very engaged by Bina’s description of the evolution of the early Web browser. Afterwards Bina said, “Alumni seemed interested in hearing about the history of Mosaic up to the start of Netscape.”

After breakfast, the Illinois alumni were treated to demonstrations of several of ADSC’s current research projects. The following is a list of demonstrations that were included in the presentation:

Video cutout and chat: Cut out your background and replace it with another background, all in real time, using your ordinary webcam and computer. Control your appearance, too, with an array of special effects. (Fundamental research contribution: real-time foreground/background separation with commodity hardware.)
3D sound direction finding: Watch a miniature microphone array track the direction of your voice in three dimensions as you move around it, in real time. (Fundamental research contribution: real-time 3D audio direction finding with portable hardware.)
Face recognition: Our system recognizes faces automatically with near-perfect accuracy, even when people disguise themselves with dark glasses. (Fundamental research contribution: high-accuracy face recognition with occlusion and/or poor lighting.)
Automated personal trainer for physical rehabilitation: No need to travel to the clinic for your rehab session. Our Kinect-based system checks to make sure you are doing your shoulder exercises properly, and reports back to the clinic. (Fundamental research contribution: object pose recognition with high accuracy in real time with commodity hardware.)
Implement your algorithm in hardware, without hardware expertise: ADSC’s hardware researchers cross-compile code written for GPUs to run on FPGAs. Their high-level synthesis system requires minimal hardware expertise, turnaround time is quick, and the resulting hardware designs are good. (Fundamental research contribution: hardware synthesis from a C-like language.)
Brush-and-drag interface for photo editing: Have 25 similar photos of your baby? Our new iPad interface makes it a lot easier to pick the best one. (Fundamental research challenge: human-friendly interfaces to large-scale visual data.)
Sports video analysis: The Illinois football team has two full-time staff members who do nothing but watch football videos and analyze what is happening in them. We’re working to put those two guys out of a job. (Fundamental research contribution: high-accuracy video frame registration and object tracking.)
Hemcam: This camera in the ceiling sees everything going on below, like a fisheye camera, but without distortion. You can choose any sub-view that interests you, in current or pre-recorded footage. (Fundamental research contribution: low-cost, distortion-free replacement for fisheye camera.)
Restaurant guide for iPad: It looks like a normal Google-maps-based restaurant locator and guide, but ours is automatically extracting information about each restaurant from half a dozen different Web sources and automatically analyzing and summarizing all the information found there. (Fundamental research contribution: automatic extraction of structure, such as schema and attribute values, from unstructured free-form text, and summarization.)

For ADSC, 2011 was a year filled with firsts: ADSC researchers received their first best paper award, protected their first trade secrets, finalized the first license for ADSC technology, created the first demonstrations of several new technologies, and received two new faculty appointments, all while having over 40 papers accepted at various conferences and journals.”We made enormous progress in 2011, which was ADSC’s second full year of operation,” Advanced Digital Sciences Center Director Marianne Winslett said. “I’m really proud of the great work that our young people are doing, and it’s been a joy to see them blossom here. From our interns to our research scientists, we’ve got a fantastic staff, and that’s why we’ve done so well.”

ADSC’s 2011 research portfolio includes eight research projects in interactive digital media, three on the smart grid, and two independent projects. The areas of research vary from hardware synthesis and video tracking to radio networks and biomedical research.

Research Accomplishments

The year began with researchers demonstrating their work to the upper management of Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). It was the first time many of the technologies, such as ARISE entity search, video cut out, and finding of the directions of sound in 2D (which has since been made 3D), had been demonstrated in public.

“For many areas of computer science, seeing is believing,” Winslett said. “For example, if you watch our demo of background removal in live video, you very quickly understand what the research is about and literally see the contribution.”

ADSC can now offer at least nine demonstrations of its research results, many of which can be seen in ADSC’s research highlights and application highlights series.

In May, University of Illinois Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Deming Chen and ADSC researcher Eric Liang, among others, were awarded ADSC’s first best paper prize at the IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM). Their paper, “Multilevel Granularity Parallelism Synthesis on FPGAs,” addressed the difficulty and slow turnaround time for producing a hardware implementation of a software algorithm.

Traditionally, the fastest approach is for the software developers to work with a hardware developer, who can produce a design for a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), an integrated circuit that can be customized after its manufacture. Chen and Liang’s research seeks to eliminate the need for a hardware developer, while also cutting the design cycle from approximately six months to just a couple of weeks. Their award-winning paper showed how to take programs written in CUDA, a C-like language that is already popular among software developers for programming GPUs, and compile the program into a good-quality FPGA design.

“We’re happy that the collaboration between ADSC and us was very fruitful,” Chen said. “The best paper award is recognition from the community, showing we have done research with impact and with high-quality results.”

Chen hopes this is just the beginning and that further research will lead to commercialization opportunities that will bring real technology benefits in Singapore and beyond.

Chen, along with Illinois Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Minh Do and ADSC researchers Kyle Rupnow, Liang, Yinan Li, and Dongbo Min, were also nominated for a best paper award at the December 2011 IEEE International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology for their paper entitled “High Level Synthesis of Stereo Matching: Productivity, Performance and Software Constraints.”

“It’s a humbling experience because both conferences are very competitive,” Chen said. “Both are considered top conferences in the field, so winning one award and being nominated again within this short period of time, during the first year of the project, is very exciting.”

One of ADSC’s goals is to turn fundamental research into real-world applications. In 2011, ADSC had its first vision research protected as a trade secret by Exploit Technologies, the commercialization arm of A*STAR. ADSC researchers are also involved with two Singaporean companies that are commercializing research results from ADSC and Illinois.

“This shows that it’s possible to do basic research that has an impact in the real world,” Winslett said. “Even though it’s fundamental research, it’s close enough to the real world to have immediate application.”

Winslett added that ADSC works to take advantage of the unique opportunities Singapore has for startup companies, and that ADSC encourages the scholar-entrepreneur model that is popular at top U.S. academic institutions.

“ADSC helps bring these novel technologies into Singapore, and the center offers a platform for people in Illinois and Singapore to get together and make contributions,” Chen said. “Through effective collaboration, the center is pushing for technology transfer, publishing high-quality papers and engaging local communities for science education. These are quite beneficial to Singapore as a whole.”

Educational Ventures

ADSC is a partner in two Ph.D. fellowship programs, the A*STAR-University of Illinois Partnership (AUIP) and the Singapore International Graduate Award (SINGA). Typically, Singaporean students enrolled in AUIP spend their first two years studying at Illinois, followed by two years of work with ADSC in Singapore. Illinois faculty, including Kevin Chang, Pierre Moulin, Minh Do, and Thomas Huang, are currently advising five AUIP Ph.D. students, with three more enrolling in 2012.

International students sponsored under A*STAR’s SINGA scholarship program can receive a Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS) or Nanyang Technological University (NTU), while carrying out research under the sole or joint supervision of ADSC researchers. The two SINGA scholars currently working on ADSC’s smart grid projects will be joined in January 2012 by one more, whose research will be in computer vision and machine learning.

As ADSC’s mission includes both research and educational components, Winslett is proud of ADSC’s alumni, such as interns and software engineers who have gone on to enroll in graduate programs at universities like Seoul National University in South Korea, as well as postdocs who have gone on to positions at places including Google and The State University of New York (SUNY).

Additionally, several of ADSC’s research scientists have taken joint appointments at local Singaporean universities. Smart Grid Program Director David Yau is an adjunct professor at NTU and NUS, while Winslett is an adjunct professor at NTU. ADSC researchers Gang Wang and Richard Ma have joint appointments at NTU and NUS, respectively. Researchers Kyle Rupnow and Jason Gu will have tenure-track appointments at NTU and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), respectively, in 2012.

Illinois Growth in Singapore

In addition to research and educational accomplishments, ADSC hired over 30 software engineers, research scientists, post-doctoral fellows, and accounting and administrative assistants in 2011. ADSC will undergo its first remodel in early 2012 to open up space for new and existing employees.

“We’ve filled up all our office space,” Winslett said. “It shows how our research has expanded over the past year–a visible sign of all the things going on.”

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty members took over 40 trips to Singapore in 2011 to conduct research, explore new research and business opportunities, and teach short courses. Illinois professors Chen and Yih-Chun Hu both spent much of the summer in Singapore to concentrate on their respective research projects.

“ADSC has a very diverse group with diverse expertise in a small, open environment,” Hu said. “The open atmosphere seems to be a good environment for fostering collaborations. Also, being in Singapore gives us ready access to information about opportunities that are unique to Singapore.”

In addition to Hu’s “Reliable Cognitive Radio Networks for Smart Grid” project, he also has a “WiMAX Protocol Fuzzing” project that is funded by Singapore’s Center for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT).

“The CSIT contract is a great example of something we couldn’t have done at Illinois, simply because we were able to use some resources that were only available in Singapore,” Hu said. “Also, some data and opportunities are only available for use in Singapore, such as the taxicab location data that we applied to get last summer. To make use of that information, we need to have people on the ground in Singapore.”

ADSC also hosted a variety of short courses and symposiums at its Fusionopolis headquarters throughout 2011. Illinois professors Kevin Chang and Jiawei Han led an Information Integration short course in January, covering large-scale data mining and integration. In July, ADSC, along with three other institutions, hosted a four-week High-Performance Computing Certification Course, in which Illinois faculty taught participants how to parallelize and optimize their code using popular high-performance computing paradigms, such as OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, and OpenMP + MPI. The attendees came away with the knowledge they needed to visualize and optimize the performance of their code, the ability to compare different approaches, and the tools necessary to develop a parallel program ideal for their environment.

ADSC sponsored multiple one-day events, including an Interactive Digital Media Symposium in August that focused on new techniques for image and video processing and analysis. IDM researchers showcased technology being developed at ADSC and the Institute for InfoComm Research (I2R). In November, ADSC held an Alumni Demo Day, at which University of Illinois alumni in Singapore were invited to view demonstrations of ADSC’s current research projects.

While 2011 has seen many firsts for ADSC, Winslett is confident that the future holds more accomplishments.

“In 2012, I’m expecting additional really exciting developments in basic research, plus more commercialization activity related to some of these fundamental results,” Winslett said. “We’re excited to have the chance to get our results out of the lab and into the real world.”

From smart phones and smart cars to smart washers and smart refrigerators, the smart revolution is fully underway. One crucial holdup, though, is the electrical smart grid, which plays a critical role in the marketability of many of these devices.

Smart appliances are appliances such as refrigerators, washers, air conditioning units, and vacuums that can be controlled wirelessly. A selling point of these appliances is that they can be linked to a smart grid, which would keep track of usage in the hopes of saving the user money. While smart grid research is still in its early stages, ADSC’s smart grid research projects are in the middle of it. Specifically, Smart Grid program director David Yau and researcher Richard Ma’s research project, “Incentive Pricing for Aggregated User Load Scheduling and Control,” looks into creation of pricing mechanisms for electrical companies using the smart grid.

Economic incentives are crucial to the smart grid’s success, as electrical companies determine whether or not customers will opt for smart appliances and their demand-response payment plans. Additionally, energy companies must set prices that allow them and retailers to make a profit. Currently, demand-response systems, which control the supply and consumption of electricity, don’t utilize effective or simple pricing mechanisms to incentivize customers.

“If we can successfully incentivize wide adoption of demand response, people may save money on electricity, and society as a whole may use less electricity too,” Yau said. “Taming peak usage can reduce the probability of overload and lead to a more stable power grid. More flexibility in load control can let us better adapt to intermittent green energy sources, which facilitates their adoption for a cleaner society.”

When an electricity grid becomes overloaded, operators want to curtail the load, because it’s very expensive to supply power at high load. There are two ways to accomplish this: ask users to drop the load, or ask them to shift the load. To drop the load, for example, an energy company might ask users to raise their room temperatures by a couple of degrees for a few hours during the heat of summer. When operators ask users to shift the load, the energy need doesn’t go away, but the timing changes. For example, an operator might ask users to do their laundry between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 a.m., thus shifting some of the energy load away from peak times. However, these approaches are only cost-effective for operators if the cost savings they receive outweigh the compensation made to customers for the curtailments.

“It’s a pretty interesting network problem, because you have multiple people involved, and they all play different roles but are interdependent,” Yau said.

Energy company operators want to maximize their profits, while users want to maximize their savings, while taking into consideration comfort, convenience level, and compensation.

In their research project, Yau and Ma are looking at demand response and how user behavior can be incentivized. By looking at pricing structures and optimal control algorithms, they are able to optimize the economic objectives for everyone involved. They are doing this research in anticipation of an expansion of the electricity grid and development of new services, such as smart appliances. As smart appliances become more prevalent, incentive pricing will become essential.

“Right now, there is no two-way control,” Yau said. “There’s no feedback currently in the electricity grid. If you turn on your A/C, you are charged. A feedback loop about the energy users enables the new paradigm.”

Yau and Ma’s goal is to develop a pricing mechanism that entices users to assume desirable energy use behaviors, in order to improve the efficiency of the smart grid. Yau has finished a paper, entitled “Profit-Optimal Demand Response in Smart Grids based on Valuation-Aware Load Curtailment,” which discusses how grid operators can exploit a form of demand response called direct load control to maximize profits, while respecting the heterogeneous needs and preferences of customers.

“We do not pass verdict yet on a universally right set of pricing schemes, but we give guidance on how different types of price functions may affect the control problem,” Yau said.

In the future, Yau envisions a variety of pricing plans with various levels of discounts for customers. Customers could choose the plan that matches their elasticity, as the usage caps will likely inconvenience or reduce the comfort level of some customers.

Still more factors need to come together before the smart grid and smart appliances are able to fully function together. Yau said that the underlying enabling technologies exist already and are becoming more cost-effective, versatile, and robust. The next step is developing IT techniques to bring the different components together and allow them to work seamlessly and in a timely manner. Additionally, standardization efforts will ensure that the smart grid and smart appliances will work with a diversity of options in the marketplace.

“A lot of factors need to converge to make smart grids flourish fully with smart appliances,” Yau said. “But I think it will happen over time.”

New Research Launched in Smart Grid Security and Computer Vision