Another short nugget of writing advice that came up last week with my supervisor meetings. When you explain concepts, it’s natural to want to illustrate with an example. But watch out for the single e.g.
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Sep
27
One e.g. = i.e.
Sep
02
Clustering with Streemer
Profiles of Office Workstation Energy Consumption Obtained Through Clustering
Clustering is one of those unsupervised learning methods that comes up time and again. I am using it heavily for behavioural grouping of people in their daily lives. The best known algorithm is called K-Means clustering. It’s quick and effective. However, there are two drawbacks to it that have prompted me to search for other methods of clustering: 1) it assumes your clusters are of the same size, and 2) you need to specify beforehand how many clusters you want.
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Sep
02
First, Best, Only: a Quick Tip for Research Contributions
From the days when research contributions were more tangible
A quick tip courtesy of my supervisor. The “research contribution” is one of the most crucial sections in your progress report, thesis or paper. Without it, you are simply indulging yourself in learning knowledge on the tax payer’s dime. But it is easy to get bogged down in the specifics of how your work differs from the pack while writing this section.
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Jan
10
Flexible Comfort and Convenience
From what I have seen of the literature in AI applied to energy saving, there is mostly the aim of finding the “easy gains”. We are searching high and low for new ways to reduce consumption, or manage demand, without requiring behaviour change or making people less comfortable. The logic is that if the savings are sufficiently impressive, then the technology should spread rapidly throughout the land (or otherwise be made compulsory by legislation). The energy saving lightbulbs are a classic example. The use of low-energy light bulbs and other efficient lighting methods could save a total of 16 billion tonnes of carbon over the next 25 years (according to the International Energy Agency) without degrading the quality of light produced.
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Jan
10
Taking Bearings
This week I have been getting my bearings within the behaviour/energy research area.
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Jan
05
PhD at Southampton Begins
Just started. For my PhD I will be investigating behaviour and intent recognition for energy use prediction. Here is my research summary:
It is predicted that world population will be 9.2 billion by 2050 and that 16% of all people will be in the middle class by 2030 (by the United Nations and the World Bank, respectively), with most of the gains coming from currently developing nations. I believe these trends (population growth and large increases in living standards for many people), and the resulting problems with resource depletion and global warming will be the biggest factors shaping human development for the next several decades. Developing new technologies that can increase the efficiency of our energy systems and provide cleaner ways of generating electricity is a major endeavour that I think can and must take place.
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