8 research outputs found
On the Sensitivity of Deep Load Disaggregation to Adversarial Attacks
Non-intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) algorithms, commonly referred to as load
disaggregation algorithms, are fundamental tools for effective energy
management. Despite the success of deep models in load disaggregation, they
face various challenges, particularly those pertaining to privacy and security.
This paper investigates the sensitivity of prominent deep NILM baselines to
adversarial attacks, which have proven to be a significant threat in domains
such as computer vision and speech recognition. Adversarial attacks entail the
introduction of imperceptible noise into the input data with the aim of
misleading the neural network into generating erroneous outputs. We investigate
the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), a well-known adversarial attack, to
perturb the input sequences fed into two commonly employed CNN-based NILM
baselines: the Sequence-to-Sequence (S2S) and Sequence-to-Point (S2P) models.
Our findings provide compelling evidence for the vulnerability of these models,
particularly the S2P model which exhibits an average decline of 20\% in the
F1-score even with small amounts of noise. Such weakness has the potential to
generate profound implications for energy management systems in residential and
industrial sectors reliant on NILM models
Crossing Roads of Federated Learning and Smart Grids: Overview, Challenges, and Perspectives
Consumer's privacy is a main concern in Smart Grids (SGs) due to the
sensitivity of energy data, particularly when used to train machine learning
models for different services. These data-driven models often require huge
amounts of data to achieve acceptable performance leading in most cases to
risks of privacy leakage. By pushing the training to the edge, Federated
Learning (FL) offers a good compromise between privacy preservation and the
predictive performance of these models. The current paper presents an overview
of FL applications in SGs while discussing their advantages and drawbacks,
mainly in load forecasting, electric vehicles, fault diagnoses, load
disaggregation and renewable energies. In addition, an analysis of main design
trends and possible taxonomies is provided considering data partitioning, the
communication topology, and security mechanisms. Towards the end, an overview
of main challenges facing this technology and potential future directions is
presented
Neural Load Disaggregation: Meta-Analysis, Federated Learning and Beyond
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) techniques are central techniques to achieve the energy sustainability goals through the identification of operating appliances in the residential and industrial sectors, potentially leading to increased rates of energy savings. NILM received significant attention in the last decade, reflected by the number of contributions and systematic reviews published yearly. In this regard, the current paper provides a meta-analysis summarising existing NILM reviews to identify widely acknowledged findings concerning NILM scholarship in general and neural NILM algorithms in particular. In addition, this paper emphasizes federated neural NILM, receiving increasing attention due to its ability to preserve end-users’ privacy. Typically, by combining several locally trained models, federated learning has excellent potential to train NILM models locally without communicating sensitive data with cloud servers. Thus, the second part of the current paper provides a summary of recent federated NILM frameworks with a focus on the main contributions of each framework and the achieved performance. Furthermore, we identify the non-availability of proper toolkits enabling easy experimentation with federated neural NILM as a primary barrier in the field. Thus, we extend existing toolkits with a federated component, made publicly available and conduct experiments on the REFIT energy dataset considering four different scenarios
Coaching Robots for Older Seniors: Do They Get What They Expect? Insights from an Austrian Study
To support the increasing number of older people, new (assistive) technologies are constantly being developed. For these technologies to be used successfully, future users need to be trained. Due to demographic change, this will become difficult in the future, as the resources for training will no longer be available. In this respect, coaching robots could have great potential to support younger seniors in particular. However, there is little evidence in the literature about the perceptions and potential impact of this technology on the well-being of older people. This paper provides insights into the use of a robot coach (robo-coach) to train younger seniors in the use of a new technology. The study was carried out in Austria in autumn 2020, involving 34 participants equally distributed among employees in their last three years of service and retirees in their first three years of retirement (23 female; 11 male). The aim was to assess participants’ expectations and perceptions by examining the perceived ease of use and user experience of the robot in providing assistance during a learning session. The findings reveal a positive impression of the participants and promising results for using the robot as a coaching assistant in daily tasks
Ageing Safely in the Digital Era: A New Unobtrusive Activity Monitoring Framework Leveraging on Daily Interactions with Hand-Operated Appliances
Supporting the elderly to maintain their independence, safety, and well-being through Active Assisted Living (AAL) technologies, is gaining increasing momentum. Recently, Non-intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) approaches have become the focus of these technologies due to their non-intrusiveness and reduced price. Whilst some research has been carried out in this respect; it still is challenging to design systems considering the heterogeneity and complexity of daily routines. Furthermore, scholars gave little attention to evaluating recent deep NILM models in AAL applications. We suggest a new interactive framework for activity monitoring based on custom user-profiles and deep NILM models to address these gaps. During evaluation, we consider four different deep NILM models. The proposed contribution is further assessed on two households from the REFIT dataset for a period of one year, including the influence of NILM on activity monitoring. To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first to quantify the error propagated by a NILM model on the performance of an AAL solution. The results achieved are promising, particularly when considering the UNET-NILM model, a multi-task convolutional neural network for load disaggregation, that revealed a deterioration of only 10% in the f1-measure of the framework’s overall performance
Dynamic Dense Subgraph Mining: A new approach for temporal graph summarization
International audienc
Neural Load Disaggregation: Meta-Analysis, Federated Learning and Beyond
Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) techniques are central techniques to achieve the energy sustainability goals through the identification of operating appliances in the residential and industrial sectors, potentially leading to increased rates of energy savings. NILM received significant attention in the last decade, reflected by the number of contributions and systematic reviews published yearly. In this regard, the current paper provides a meta-analysis summarising existing NILM reviews to identify widely acknowledged findings concerning NILM scholarship in general and neural NILM algorithms in particular. In addition, this paper emphasizes federated neural NILM, receiving increasing attention due to its ability to preserve end-users’ privacy. Typically, by combining several locally trained models, federated learning has excellent potential to train NILM models locally without communicating sensitive data with cloud servers. Thus, the second part of the current paper provides a summary of recent federated NILM frameworks with a focus on the main contributions of each framework and the achieved performance. Furthermore, we identify the non-availability of proper toolkits enabling easy experimentation with federated neural NILM as a primary barrier in the field. Thus, we extend existing toolkits with a federated component, made publicly available and conduct experiments on the REFIT energy dataset considering four different scenarios