Abstract.A hardware and software platform has been designed and implemented for modeling, testing, and deploying distributed peer-to-peer sensor networks comprised of many identical nodes. Each node possesses the tangible affordances of a commonplace pushpin to meet ease-of-use and power considerations. The sensing, computational, and communication abilities of a "Pushpin", as well as a "Pushpin" operating system supporting mobile computational processes are treated in detail. Example applications and future work are discussed.
Demand response (DR) programs encourage end-use customers to alter their power consumption in response to DR events such as change in real-time electricity prices. Facilitating household participation in DR programs is essential as the residential sector accounts for a sizable portion of the total energy consumed. However, manually tracking energy prices and deciding on how to schedule home appliances can be a challenge for residential consumers who are accustomed to fixed price electricity tariffs. In this work, we present Yupik, a system that helps users respond to realtime electricity prices while being sensitive to their context and lifestyle. Yupik combines sensing, analytics, and optimization to generate appliance usage schedules that may be used by households to minimize their energy bill as well as potential lifestyle disruptions. Yupik uses jPlugs, appliance level energy metering devices, to continuously monitor the power usage by various home appliances. The consumption patterns as well as data from external sources are analyzed using data mining algorithms to infer user's preferred usage profile. Using the preferred profile as a reference, Yupik's optimization engine generates multiple usage plans that attempt to minimize energy and inconvenience costs. Some of Yupik's capabilities are demonstrated with the help of preliminary data collected from a home that was instrumented with jPlugs to monitor the power usage of a few devices.
There has been intense debate about lockdown policies in the context of Covid-19 for limiting damage both to health and to the economy. We present an AI-driven approach for generating optimal lockdown policies that control the spread of the disease while balancing both health and economic costs. Furthermore, the proposed reinforcement learning approach automatically learns those policies, as a function of disease and population parameters. The approach accounts for imperfect lockdowns, can be used to explore a range of policies using tunable parameters, and can be easily extended to fine-grained lockdown strictness. The control approach can be used with any compatible disease and network simulation models.
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