Summer 2006 Seminar

 
 
       
  Machine Learning Seminar Series
 
 
  Seminar Schedule (Seminar Organizer: Prof. Ziv Bar-Joseph)
 

 

ML/Google Seminars

Machine Learning Lunchtime Chats

 

 

Date: August 24, 2006
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM (Refreshments)
Location: 4623 Wean Hall
Speaker: Vipul Singhvi Machine Learning MS Student
Title: Intelligent Light Control Using Sensor Networks
Abstract: Increasing user comfort and reducing operation costs have always been two primary objectives of building operations and control strategies. Current building control strategies are unable to incorporate occupant level comfort and meet the operation goals simultaneously. In this paper, we present a novel utility based building control strategy that optimizes the tradeoff in meeting the user comfort and reduction in operation cost by reducing energy usage. We present an implementation of the proposed control strategy as an intelligent lighting control strategy that significantly reduces energy cost. Our approach is based on a principled, decision theoretic formulation of the control task. We demonstrate the use of mobile wireless sensor networks to optimize the trade-off between fulfilling different occupants' light preferences and minimizing energy consumption. We further extend our approach to optimally exploit external light sources for additional energy savings, a process called daylight harvesting. Also we demonstrate that, an active sensing approach maximizes the mobile sensor network's lifetime by sensing only during most informative situations. We provide efficient algorithms for solving the underlying complex optimization problems and we extensively evaluate our proposed approach in a proof-of-concept testbed using MICA2 motes and dimmable lamps. Our experimental results indicate a significant improvement in user utility, and reduced energy cost.