This week I am attending the 2009 Behavior, Energy, and Climate Change conference in Washington, D.C. This is the third year of the conference, and the first time I've attended it. The conference has grown from around 250 people the first year to around 700 this year, and it shows: some of the tracks yesterday were so popular that you had to stand outside the room and listen.
Due to travel arrangements, I missed most of the first set of concurrent sessions, and so the first talk that I attended in its entirety was the lunch speaker: US Representative Brian Baird, who is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. He is a former clinical psychologist and so is very open to the idea that behavior is an important issue when thinking about energy use and climate change. (This seems like a no brainer, though the political right is accusing him of mind control.) He had some interesting, low cost ideas on how to improve energy efficiency, such as to require that MLS listings of houses for sale should state the energy usage of the house (electricity and gas) over the past year. This would incentivize home owners to improve the energy efficiency of their home (and use energy wisely), as it would make their house more attractive on the market, and enable home buyers to choose between two houses by picking the one with lower potential energy usage (all other things being equal.)
The afternoon had six concurrent sessions, of which two (Behavior Research and Policy Agenda; Technology Design) were of interest to me. This appears to be a happy problem that I will struggle with for the remainder of the conference: there are always multiple places I want to be at once. I chose the first session and listened to Ed Vine from the California Institute for Energy and the Environment give a review of nine papers sponsored by his organization for the California Public Utilities Commission. They covered a lot of ground, from experimental design to process issues to market segmentation to behavioral issues. You can get links to these and other related papers here.
The day concluded with a panel session on Smart Grid, with Matthew Trevithick from Venrock (a VC firm), Gregory Abowd from Georgia Tech, Omar Khan from Google's PowerMeter program, and Carrie Armel from Stanford's Precourt Energy Efficiency Center. (The Precourt Center website has an excellent section devoted to behavior with an 800+ citation database.)
Each panelist gave a very short presentation giving their perspective on smart grid and behavior, followed by lots of Q&A with the audience. One of the many interested issues touched upon was an informal "stages of use" observed by the Google Powermeter team: users begin by learning about the system, then they engage with it to change their use, then they finally move into a maintenance phase. The learning/engagement phases appear to last only a week or two, where users are actively manipulating the system and discovering issues with their usage and making concrete changes. During this phase, they want to be able to drill down, do experiments, and so forth. In the maintenance phase, they basically only want the system to tell them if something has changed in their energy usage.
On to Day Two or Day Three.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
First experiences with the TED 5000
This past weekend I became the proud owner of a TED 5000 home energy monitor. I thought it might be useful to detail some initial experiences for the Renewable Energy and Island Sustainability Project and for our own subproject on From Smart Grids to Smart Consumers.
Overview of the TED 5000
The TED-5000 consists of four components.
MTU: The "MTU" (for Measurement Transmitting Unit) goes inside your electric panel and monitors the power being consumed by your house.
Gateway: The "Gateway" is a small unit that plugs into a wall outlet and connects to your router (in my case, an Airport) using an ethernet cable. The Gateway receives current power consumption data from the MTU every few seconds via a proprietary powerline network protocol.
Display Unit: The "Display Unit" is a small handheld device (like an iPod) that communicates wirelessly with the Gateway using Zigbee and can show you (among other things) a near real-time display of your power usage.
Footprints: Finally, "Footprints" is a web application that runs on the Gateway. You use Footprints to configure your TED, display various graphs and charts, and install Firmware updates.
Installation:
Installing the TED 5000 involves: (1) opening the electric panel and connecting the MTU; (2) plugging in the Gateway and attaching an ethernet cable from it to my Airport; and (3) accessing the Footprints web application and setting some configuration values.
I found that connecting the MTU was pretty straightforward, basically because I had two electrically-akamai friends (Robert Brewer and Tony Querubin) helping and thus my personal involvement was limited to showing them where my electrical panel was located, holding a flashlight, and serving them Apple Huguenot torte when they finished. The TED installation video provides a good approximation to what's involved, though there are some minor changes from the TED 1000 to the TED 5000.
Installation Glitch #1: No http://TED5000
The installation manual says that after hooking up the MTU and Gateway, you can access the Footprints web application using: http://TED5000. That fails for non-Windows systems. Fortunately, Robert was already aware of the problem and how to work around it. First, he looked up my Mac's IP address (10.0.1.3) and invoked "ping 10.0.1.255" to find out all of the devices on the 10.0.1.* subnet. Three devices responded: my Airport (10.0.1.1), my computer (10.0.1.3), and a third "mystery" device at 10.0.1.2. Bingo: the URL to the footprints software on my computer is: http://10.0.1.2/Footprints.html.
You might think that providing a URL that only works on Windows systems (and not even stating that in the installation guide) is pretty lame. But wait, it gets worse:
Installation Glitch #2: No HST.
The Display Unit provides the current time, and to do so, it needs to know the time zone. Part of the configuration process in Footprints involves specifying the time zone, for which it provides a drop down menu with exactly four choices: EST, CST, MST, and PST. No HST for those of us in Hawaii; no AKST for those of us in Alaska. I am hoping the TED programmers get a clue in the near future and issue a firmware update that fixes this problem; in the interim, my Display Unit is laboring under the illusion that it lives in California.
Initial results
Having real-time display of power usage reminds me a great deal of when we first got our Prius: all of a sudden you're getting a whole new dimension of interesting data about your environment. From a safety perspective, the TED has it all over the Prius, since it does not tempt you to monitor whether you're running exclusively on battery power while driving down the Pali Highway at rush hour.
Instead, from the sedentary position of my kitchen table, I can now inform you that our baseline power usage is around 400 Watts. Each of our ceiling fans use about 50 W. Turning on the microwave increases our power usage by about 1000 W. I am too horrified to confess how much power our tiny, "Energy Star", 5000 BTU window air conditioner uses on startup, but it dwarfs every other appliance we own by a mile.
I am sure that we are similar to every other new TED user, in that we tend to run over to the Display Unit whenever we do anything (turn on/off the TV, turn on/off the stove, etc.) to see what effect it has on our power consumption. Similarly, if we're in the vicinity of the Display Unit and our power usage is significantly different from 400W, we start wondering what's going on.
It's also cool to empirically test various things you've heard in the news. For example, Joanne read some place that you should unplug your toaster oven when you're not using it because it uses up power. That seemed suspect to me, so I took the Display Unit over to our toaster oven, unplugged it, and waited for a drop in power consumption. Nada.
Behavioral change, or Is This Just a $250 toy?
The real question is whether the TED 5000 is anything more than an expensive toy, and the answer to that depends upon whether we actually change (i.e. reduce) our energy consumption now that we know what we're doing.
The jury is still out on that question, though of course the jury has only had about 36 hours to deliberate. What I can say at this point is the following:
(1) Our espresso maker is an energy hog. I was surprised to see that it uses over 1000W, and this is significant because we tend to turn it on first thing in the morning and leave it on for a couple of hours until we have finished making all our morning espressos. Given its energy consumption, we should turn it off between uses even though that means we need to wait for it to heat up again.
(2) Our TV/DVR's standby power consumption is fairly low. We have heard horror stories about LCDs TVs that consume many watts even when "off", and we were happy to discover that our TV uses only 1-2W when in standby. The DVR uses about 20-22W in standby. That's not too bad, although that 25W does account for about 6% of our "baseline" 400 W.
(3) We need to replace our remaining incandescent lightbulbs with CFLs without delay. When your baseline is 400W, and you turn on the kitchen lights and it jumps by 25%, you just feel stupid.
I intend to do a bit more detective work on our baseline usage, and perhaps we can cut that down. Come to think of it, we should not make any changes to our behavior for a week so that we can establish a decent baseline dataset of our current-but-soon-to-be-history energetically profligate lifestyle.
For another new TED 5000 user's experience, see here.
Overview of the TED 5000
The TED-5000 consists of four components.
MTU: The "MTU" (for Measurement Transmitting Unit) goes inside your electric panel and monitors the power being consumed by your house.
Installation:
Installing the TED 5000 involves: (1) opening the electric panel and connecting the MTU; (2) plugging in the Gateway and attaching an ethernet cable from it to my Airport; and (3) accessing the Footprints web application and setting some configuration values.
I found that connecting the MTU was pretty straightforward, basically because I had two electrically-akamai friends (Robert Brewer and Tony Querubin) helping and thus my personal involvement was limited to showing them where my electrical panel was located, holding a flashlight, and serving them Apple Huguenot torte when they finished. The TED installation video provides a good approximation to what's involved, though there are some minor changes from the TED 1000 to the TED 5000.
Installation Glitch #1: No http://TED5000
The installation manual says that after hooking up the MTU and Gateway, you can access the Footprints web application using: http://TED5000. That fails for non-Windows systems. Fortunately, Robert was already aware of the problem and how to work around it. First, he looked up my Mac's IP address (10.0.1.3) and invoked "ping 10.0.1.255" to find out all of the devices on the 10.0.1.* subnet. Three devices responded: my Airport (10.0.1.1), my computer (10.0.1.3), and a third "mystery" device at 10.0.1.2. Bingo: the URL to the footprints software on my computer is: http://10.0.1.2/Footprints.html.
You might think that providing a URL that only works on Windows systems (and not even stating that in the installation guide) is pretty lame. But wait, it gets worse:
Installation Glitch #2: No HST.
The Display Unit provides the current time, and to do so, it needs to know the time zone. Part of the configuration process in Footprints involves specifying the time zone, for which it provides a drop down menu with exactly four choices: EST, CST, MST, and PST. No HST for those of us in Hawaii; no AKST for those of us in Alaska. I am hoping the TED programmers get a clue in the near future and issue a firmware update that fixes this problem; in the interim, my Display Unit is laboring under the illusion that it lives in California.
Initial results
Having real-time display of power usage reminds me a great deal of when we first got our Prius: all of a sudden you're getting a whole new dimension of interesting data about your environment. From a safety perspective, the TED has it all over the Prius, since it does not tempt you to monitor whether you're running exclusively on battery power while driving down the Pali Highway at rush hour.
Instead, from the sedentary position of my kitchen table, I can now inform you that our baseline power usage is around 400 Watts. Each of our ceiling fans use about 50 W. Turning on the microwave increases our power usage by about 1000 W. I am too horrified to confess how much power our tiny, "Energy Star", 5000 BTU window air conditioner uses on startup, but it dwarfs every other appliance we own by a mile.
I am sure that we are similar to every other new TED user, in that we tend to run over to the Display Unit whenever we do anything (turn on/off the TV, turn on/off the stove, etc.) to see what effect it has on our power consumption. Similarly, if we're in the vicinity of the Display Unit and our power usage is significantly different from 400W, we start wondering what's going on.
It's also cool to empirically test various things you've heard in the news. For example, Joanne read some place that you should unplug your toaster oven when you're not using it because it uses up power. That seemed suspect to me, so I took the Display Unit over to our toaster oven, unplugged it, and waited for a drop in power consumption. Nada.
Behavioral change, or Is This Just a $250 toy?
The real question is whether the TED 5000 is anything more than an expensive toy, and the answer to that depends upon whether we actually change (i.e. reduce) our energy consumption now that we know what we're doing.
The jury is still out on that question, though of course the jury has only had about 36 hours to deliberate. What I can say at this point is the following:
(1) Our espresso maker is an energy hog. I was surprised to see that it uses over 1000W, and this is significant because we tend to turn it on first thing in the morning and leave it on for a couple of hours until we have finished making all our morning espressos. Given its energy consumption, we should turn it off between uses even though that means we need to wait for it to heat up again.
(2) Our TV/DVR's standby power consumption is fairly low. We have heard horror stories about LCDs TVs that consume many watts even when "off", and we were happy to discover that our TV uses only 1-2W when in standby. The DVR uses about 20-22W in standby. That's not too bad, although that 25W does account for about 6% of our "baseline" 400 W.
(3) We need to replace our remaining incandescent lightbulbs with CFLs without delay. When your baseline is 400W, and you turn on the kitchen lights and it jumps by 25%, you just feel stupid.
I intend to do a bit more detective work on our baseline usage, and perhaps we can cut that down. Come to think of it, we should not make any changes to our behavior for a week so that we can establish a decent baseline dataset of our current-but-soon-to-be-history energetically profligate lifestyle.
For another new TED 5000 user's experience, see here.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Pretty printing code with google-code-prettify
There are many ways to pretty print code in blogs, as a Google search will show you, and all the methods involve a certain amount of hassle. After some fooling around today, I have come across the following approach which is pretty simple and has the advantage that you don't have to preprocess your code to escape certain characters (such as angle brackets).
My currently preferred approach uses google-code-prettify, which I suspect is the package used to perform syntax highlighting in google project hosting. Integrating this package in Blogger requires three steps:
1. Update the <head> section of your Blogger template
Insert the following lines of code:
Change it to:
3. Insert your code using <code class="prettyprint lang-java">
You must be in "Edit Html" mode, not "Compose" mode, when you do this. Here is an example of the results:
OK, if you have followed me so far, and if your Blog template has a light background, then the code should be formatted nicely. However, if your Blogger template has a black background like mine, then the results are terrible, because the default colors in prettify.css are designed to look good against a white background, not a black background.
The reason why my code sample looks relatively reasonable is because I use a custom version of prettify.css where I have changed the colors to those that contrast well with a black background. This file is available to you at:
http://ics-software-engineering.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/prettify/prettify.css
So, use this URL in the <link> element that you inserted into the <head> element of your Blogger template, and you should be fine.
If you don't like my choice of colors (or google's), you can create your own prettify.css, place it somewhere on the web, and reference it to get your own coloring scheme.
There is a bug in Blogger that you should be aware of: if you switch back and forth between "Compose" and "Edit HTML" mode while doing this, at some point Blogger eliminates all indentation in your code. You can avoid this by not using "Compose", or else by inserting your code as the last step in creating your posting.
My currently preferred approach uses google-code-prettify, which I suspect is the package used to perform syntax highlighting in google project hosting. Integrating this package in Blogger requires three steps:
1. Update the <head> section of your Blogger template
Insert the following lines of code:
<link href="http://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/prettify/prettify.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> <script src="http://google-code-prettify.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/prettify.js" type="text/javascript" />2. Update the <body> element tag of your Blogger template
Change it to:
<body onload="prettyPrint()">Save these changes to your template.
3. Insert your code using <code class="prettyprint lang-java">
You must be in "Edit Html" mode, not "Compose" mode, when you do this. Here is an example of the results:
/**
* Creates a new CD, provided its title, group, and song list.
* @param title The title.
* @param group The group.
* @param tracks The song titles.
*/
public CompactDisc(String title, String group, String... tracks) {
this.title = title;
this.group = group;
this.tracks = Arrays.asList(tracks);
// Since CompactDiscs are immutable, the hash value will never change for an instance.
this.hashvalue = (new String(title + group)).hashCode();
}
OK, if you have followed me so far, and if your Blog template has a light background, then the code should be formatted nicely. However, if your Blogger template has a black background like mine, then the results are terrible, because the default colors in prettify.css are designed to look good against a white background, not a black background.
The reason why my code sample looks relatively reasonable is because I use a custom version of prettify.css where I have changed the colors to those that contrast well with a black background. This file is available to you at:
http://ics-software-engineering.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/prettify/prettify.css
So, use this URL in the <link> element that you inserted into the <head> element of your Blogger template, and you should be fine.
If you don't like my choice of colors (or google's), you can create your own prettify.css, place it somewhere on the web, and reference it to get your own coloring scheme.
There is a bug in Blogger that you should be aware of: if you switch back and forth between "Compose" and "Edit HTML" mode while doing this, at some point Blogger eliminates all indentation in your code. You can avoid this by not using "Compose", or else by inserting your code as the last step in creating your posting.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Google Summer of Code Midterm Results for Hackystat
I am delighted to announce that all five of the GSoC students working on Hackystat have passed their midterm evaluation and will be continuing with us for the rest of the summer.
Myriam Leggieri is working on the use of RDF to facilitate integration of Hackystat data with other kinds of knowledge sources in the project hackystat-linked-sensor-data.
Rachel Shadoan is working on the integration of social networking with Hackystat data in order to create novel data mining opportunities in the project hackystat-analysis-socnet.
Harvey Weitz is investigating a case-based reasoning approach to management for service-oriented architecture, using Hackystat as his test case, in the project hackystat-service-manager.
Anthony Du is implementing a software engineering educational game in the project hackystat-ui-devcathlon, building upon the initial work done in ICS 414 last spring.
Last but not least, Shaoxuan Zhang is implementing support for Issue sensor data collection and analysis through the hackystat-sensor-ant project.
All of these students have made significant progress on their projects so far, and the summer is only half over. I look forward to see what they have working by September!
Myriam Leggieri is working on the use of RDF to facilitate integration of Hackystat data with other kinds of knowledge sources in the project hackystat-linked-sensor-data.
Rachel Shadoan is working on the integration of social networking with Hackystat data in order to create novel data mining opportunities in the project hackystat-analysis-socnet.
Harvey Weitz is investigating a case-based reasoning approach to management for service-oriented architecture, using Hackystat as his test case, in the project hackystat-service-manager.
Anthony Du is implementing a software engineering educational game in the project hackystat-ui-devcathlon, building upon the initial work done in ICS 414 last spring.
Last but not least, Shaoxuan Zhang is implementing support for Issue sensor data collection and analysis through the hackystat-sensor-ant project.
All of these students have made significant progress on their projects so far, and the summer is only half over. I look forward to see what they have working by September!
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Google Summer of Code 2009
Applications for Google Summer of Code 2009 are coming up soon. I recently gave a short talk on Google Summer of Code to some graduate students at the University of Hawaii. Here is a screencast of that lecture:
Saturday, October 11, 2008
How to guarantee you will not be considered for a student internship
Since I founded the Collaborative Software Development Laboratory in 1991, I have provided research positions and internships to students from across the world, including Germany, Italy, India, China, Japan, Australia, Iceland, and Indonesia. Providing these opportunities to students, and learning from their differing cultural backgrounds is one of the great pleasures of being a professor.
Every semester I receive dozens of emails from students around the world who are requesting consideration for a research position of some sort in my lab. Unfortunately, most of them are quite similar to the one I just received this morning:
Dear Prof.,
To introduce myself, I am a 3rd year student of the Department of [Deleted] Majoring in Statistics and Informatics(5 yr.Integrated) at [Deleted], [Deleted]'s premier research organization, looking at the possibility of obtaining a position for Summer Internship, gelling with my academic background. I am aware of the superior quality of research at your institute ,I have decided that your current research work matches my interests to a remarkable degree.
Enclosed please find a copy of my resume. A number of details about my profile appear in the same. Yet no resume can comprehensively spell out everything.If my profile, prima facie matches with your requirements for a Summer Intern, please revert back, so that I could furnish any more relevant information.May I please also enquire whether some funding may be available for this internship in the form of a grant or scholarship?
Looking forward to a reply in the affirmative.
If selected by your consideration I promise to complete my assignments with utmost sincerity.
--
Thanking you
Your Sincerely....
There are, of course, a number of grammatical errors in this email, but since this student is clearly a non-native speaker, those errors would not deter me in the slightest from considering him for a research internship.
What makes this request a non-starter is the fact that this student sent me a form letter: there is not a single detail in this letter that provides evidence that the student has any clue about my research interests. Indeed, this student does not even take the time to address the email to me personally!
So, with the goal of helping other students who might be interested in academic experiences outside of their current environment, here is a simple guideline:
Send 10 personal, carefully written emails to professors whose research interests really do match your own, with concrete details about their research and how it intersects with your academic interests. These 10 emails have higher odds of success than (for example) 1000 generic emails sent to every professor in the country of your choice.
What might a "personal, carefully written email" include? Here are some ideas:
When I receive this kind of email from a student, I consider it carefully, and even if their interests don't really match mine, I reply out of respect for the energy they clearly put into their request and try to provide pointers to colleagues with better matching interests.
And there you see the key to why this approach is more effective: if you, as a student, devote this kind of energy up front on a small number of letters to a small number of professors, you can enlist our help in the search process. In terms of searching the space of appropriate research institutes, having professors guide your search is significantly more effective than spewing out 1000 generic emails.
Have I ever received such a letter from a student? Yes, several times, and in fact the most recent student who introduced himself this way is arriving in my lab on Monday to start his internship.
Every semester I receive dozens of emails from students around the world who are requesting consideration for a research position of some sort in my lab. Unfortunately, most of them are quite similar to the one I just received this morning:
Dear Prof.,
To introduce myself, I am a 3rd year student of the Department of [Deleted] Majoring in Statistics and Informatics(5 yr.Integrated) at [Deleted], [Deleted]'s premier research organization, looking at the possibility of obtaining a position for Summer Internship, gelling with my academic background. I am aware of the superior quality of research at your institute ,I have decided that your current research work matches my interests to a remarkable degree.
Enclosed please find a copy of my resume. A number of details about my profile appear in the same. Yet no resume can comprehensively spell out everything.If my profile, prima facie matches with your requirements for a Summer Intern, please revert back, so that I could furnish any more relevant information.May I please also enquire whether some funding may be available for this internship in the form of a grant or scholarship?
Looking forward to a reply in the affirmative.
If selected by your consideration I promise to complete my assignments with utmost sincerity.
--
Thanking you
Your Sincerely....
There are, of course, a number of grammatical errors in this email, but since this student is clearly a non-native speaker, those errors would not deter me in the slightest from considering him for a research internship.
What makes this request a non-starter is the fact that this student sent me a form letter: there is not a single detail in this letter that provides evidence that the student has any clue about my research interests. Indeed, this student does not even take the time to address the email to me personally!
So, with the goal of helping other students who might be interested in academic experiences outside of their current environment, here is a simple guideline:
Send 10 personal, carefully written emails to professors whose research interests really do match your own, with concrete details about their research and how it intersects with your academic interests. These 10 emails have higher odds of success than (for example) 1000 generic emails sent to every professor in the country of your choice.
What might a "personal, carefully written email" include? Here are some ideas:
- Include the professor's actual name.
- Include the professor's actual laboratory name.
- Include references to at least two recent publications of the professor, with questions and/or comments about the papers that indicate that you have read the papers and reflected on them.
- Include some simple, but concrete ideas on how you might contribute to the research. These don't have to be feasible or ground breaking. Just demonstrate that you're trying.
- Optionally, include other areas of interest of yours, which might have some interdisciplinary connection.
When I receive this kind of email from a student, I consider it carefully, and even if their interests don't really match mine, I reply out of respect for the energy they clearly put into their request and try to provide pointers to colleagues with better matching interests.
And there you see the key to why this approach is more effective: if you, as a student, devote this kind of energy up front on a small number of letters to a small number of professors, you can enlist our help in the search process. In terms of searching the space of appropriate research institutes, having professors guide your search is significantly more effective than spewing out 1000 generic emails.
Have I ever received such a letter from a student? Yes, several times, and in fact the most recent student who introduced himself this way is arriving in my lab on Monday to start his internship.
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