Research Projects
Below are brief summaries to highlight current ongoing projects, along with selected project publications and funding sources. This page only summarizes a fraction of our work. For more information, please see the publications page.
Designing Smart* Homes
The Smart* project focuses on new opportunities for optimizing and scheduling the energy consumption of modern “smart homes,” which include pervasive energy sensing and actuation capabilities. As part of the project, we have heavily instrumented several real homes to serve as experimental testbeds for our research. We have publicly released much of our data and software tools from our deployments. In general, our work adapts resource management techniques from operating systems and networking to manage resources and energy in buildings.
- GreenCharge: Managing Renewable Energy in Smart Buildings
Aditya Mishra, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy,
Jim Kurose, and Ting Zhu
JSAC 2013 - Smart*: An Open Data Set and Tools for Enabling Research in Sustainable Homes
Sean Barker, Aditya Mishra, David Irwin,
Emmanuel Cecchet, Prashant Shenoy, and Jeannie Albrecht
SustKDD 2012 - SmartCap: Flattening Peak Electricity Demand in Smart Homes
Sean Barker, Aditya Mishra, David Irwin,
Prashant Shenoy, and Jeannie Albrecht
PerCom 2012
Model-based Building Energy Data Analytics
A significant barrier to improving building energy efficiency is that fine-grained monitoring of electrical loads at large scales remains impractical: it is expensive, invasive, and unreliable. The project’s goal is to advance our understanding of building energy consumption using a model-based paradigm to design a wide range of novel non-intrusive energy data data analytics using a building’s smart meter data. Our analytics combine domain-specific knowledge of power systems with sophisticated machine learning techniques to reveal new insights into building energy usage.
- PowerPlay: Creating Virtual Power Meters through Online Load Tracking in Smart Homes
Sean Barker, Sandeep Kalra, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy
BuildSys 2014 - SolarCast – A Cloud-based Black Box Solar Predictor for Smart Homes
Srini Iyengar, Navin Sharma, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, and Krithi Ramamkritham
BuildSys 2014 - Empirical Characterization, Modeling, and Analysis of Smart Meter Data
Sean Barker, Sandeep Kalra, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy
JSAC 2014
Supported by NSF grant #1253063
System Support for Transient Servers
Today’s distributed applications are built under the implicit assumption that the underlying servers will be mostly available, aside from occasional faults. However, in many emerging scenarios, data centers and clouds now provide transient availability, such that servers are available temporarily for an uncertain amount of time. Transience in modern distributed systems arises in many contexts, including green data centers powered using renewable energy sources, cloud platforms that sell servers in dynamic spot markets, and smart data centers that curtail their energy usage based on signals from the smart grid. This project focuses on designing distributed systems that treat transience as a first-class design objective. In particular, since traditional fault-tolerance methods are too expensive or not well suited to handling the intermittent availability of transient servers, we focus on low-cost transience mechanisms for modern data center and cloud platforms.
- Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Exploiting Transient Servers in Data Centers
Rahul Singh, Prateek Sharma, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, and K.K. Ramakrishnan
Internet Computing 2014 - Yank: Enabling Green Data Centers to Pull the Plug
Rahul Singh, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, and
K.K. Ramakrishnan
NSDI 2013
Smart Grid Security and Privacy
While improved networked sensors and data analytics are enabling a new level of visibility into building activity and energy usage, they also raise new security and privacy concerns. To prevent these concerns from discouraging broader adoption of “smart” technologies, it is important to ensure buildings are able to control the information they leak to third parties, including utilities, cloud platforms, etc. Our research focuses on low-cost and non-intrusive methods for ensuring consumer security and privacy in buildings that include pervasive networked sensing and actuation.
- Combined Heat and Privacy: Preventing Occupancy Detection from Smart Meters
Dong Chen, David Irwin, Prashant Shenoy, and Jeannie Albrecht
PerCom 2014 - Designing Privacy-preserving Smart Meters with Low-cost Microcontrollers
Andrés Molina-Markham, George Danezis, Kevin Fu,
Prashant Shenoy and David Irwin
FC 2012 - Private Memoirs of a Smart Meter
Andrés Molina-Markham, Prashant Shenoy, Kevin Fu, Emmanuel Cecchet, and David Irwin
BuildSys 2010
Designing Net-Zero Data Centers and Clouds
Despite energy-efficiency improvements, data center energy demands continue to rise, increasing worldwide by an estimated 56% from 2005-2010 and accounting for an estimated 1.7-2.2% of U.S. electricity usage. This project focuses on designing net-zero data centers that operate, either directly or indirectly, off intermittent renewable energy sources. Thus, our focus is primarily on designing data center applications to operate efficiently in the presence of significant and frequent power fluctuations from renewable energy sources. Our project benefits from the close proximity of the new Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
- A Distributed File System for Intermittent Power
Navin Sharma, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy
IGCC 2013 - Towards Continuous Policy-driven Demand Response in Data Centers
David Irwin, Navin Sharma, and Prashant Shenoy
GreenNets 2011 - Blink: Managing Server Clusters on Intermittent Power
Navin Sharma, Sean Barker, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy
ASPLOS 2011
Supported by NSF grant #1339839