Demand Response; What is it and
What are the Business Opportunities?

Dr. Bjorn Frogner

4:00pm Wednesday, 17 August 2011
Maryland Clean Energy Technology Incubator
UMBC South Campus

Bjorn will discuss the aspect of the Smart Grid called Demand Response (DR). DR is where the action is in the Smart Grid. Implementation of DR is made possible by the merger of the following two forces.

• The State of Maryland has set the goal of reducing average electricity consumption by 15% and reducing the peak-to-average consumption by 15%. These two requirements will reduce the peak capacity needs by 30%. The goal is to reach these goals by 2015. This makes DR more valuable than all other renewable energy sources combined for the next five years.
• Smart Meters are already available in many businesses and they are soon going to be installed in 1.5 million homes in BGE and PEPCO customer residences. These meters will provide two-way communication and data readings from our homes as frequently as every 15 minutes. This provides tremendous opportunities for changes in the way we consume electricity.

These forces will rapidly transform the electric utility industry. DR will make the cost of electricity become a function of supply and demand which will make electricity be like other commodities where the market determines the price. If you are well-informed, you may save money. And, if you are real well-informed, you may be able to see some of the many new business opportunities that are being created by DR.

Bjorn Frogner has a PhD in Nuclear Engineering from University of California at Berkeley. He worked for about 35 years across a broad range of technologies, primarily related to energy and IT, while he lived in Silicon Valley in California. He moved to Annapolis, Maryland, in 2009 and he now works part-time as Entrepreneur-in- Residence at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His function there is to help startup companies in the clean energy field. He had many years of experience with the electric grid during the 70s and 80s. He has spent significant amount of time during the last 18 months making himself informed about the cyber security for the electric grid.

If your research involved language processing and/or machine learning you should consider submitting a poster abstract to the Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning.

This is a free, one-day event bringing together faculty, researchers and students from universities in the Mid-Atlantic area working in human language technology and/or machine learning. It is an opportunity for students to present preliminary or completed work and to network with other students, faculty and researchers working in related fields. The event will be held at JHU in Baltimore on Friday 23 September 2011.

Students are encouraged to submit one-page abstracts by Monday, August 15 describing ongoing, planned, or completed research projects, including previously published results and negative results. Submissions and presentations must be made by students or postdocs. See the call for papers for more information.

Accepted submissions will be presented as posters and each will also be given a one-minute presentation during a poster spotlight session. A small number of submissions will be selected to be presented as talks, on the basis of diversity and general interest. Student-led breakout sessions of one hour will also be held to discuss papers on topics of interest and stimulate interaction and discussion.

Dr. Sergei Nirenburg, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, is a member of the truly smart agents research group (TSA), where he works on building artificial intelligent agents capable of human behavior. Since 2006, Dr. Nireburg has been working on the Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP) Project, a multi-level heterogeneous agent-oriented environment that simulates a doctor-patient relationship by way of a "virtual patient."

To read more about Dr. Nirenburg's research pursuits, see his full research profile.

Dr. Gymama Slaughter, assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering, runs UMBC's Bioelectronics Laboratory (BEL@UMBC), which combines different projects in the areas of electronics, biology, medicine and chemistry. She is currently working on designing a closed-loop system that monitors blood glucose levels and administers insulin to diabetic patients. Dr. Slaughter says that what she desires most is to reduce complications in the lives of diabetic patients and their families. “If I can do that,” she says, “I will count what I do as successful.”

To read more about Dr. Slaughter's research pursuits, see her full research profile.

Dr. Tim Finin, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, specializes in artificial intelligence and has been working on developing smart phones that can guage their user's "context." “What I have always found interesting since I was an Undergraduate was the idea that we could make machines as smart as people,” explains Dr. Finin, whose research involving semantic web technology is directed towards realizing that goal.

To read more about Dr. Finin's research pursuits, see his full research profile.

Twenty years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary about the new World Wide Web project on the public alt.hypertext newsgroup. A copy of the first Web page mentioned in his post is hosted by the W3C.

The Web is arguably the most significant computing technology that has been developed in the forty years, although was enabled by other key developments, including the Internet and the “personal” computer. The impact of Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s simple idea and the principles behind it continues to grow as we discover new ways to apply it.

You can read more about the history of the Web in several Wikipedia articles, on the World Wide Web Consortium Web history page, and at CERN.

The Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering would like to welcome new lecturer, Shawn Lupoli, to the department. Mr. Lupoli will be teaching CMSC 201 (Introduction to Computer Science) and CMSC 104 (Problem Solving and Computer Programming) at UMBC this Fall.

Shawn Lupoli’s interest in robotics sparked when he was pursing an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Frostburg State University. “The hands-on experience ignited my imagination,” says Mr. Lupoli of the robotics course that appealed to his inner-electrician. As a Master’s student at Towson University, Mr. Lupoli used LEGO, Vex Robotics and Fischertechnik robot kits as teaching tools in his Computer Science courses to engage his students with fun, hands-on projects.

“I’ve always wanted to teach,” says Mr. Lupoli, who was influenced by his father, who has been an Industrial Technology teacher at Perryville Middle School for thirty-four years. After receiving his Master’s in Computer Science from Towson University, Lupoli dove into teaching introductory computer science courses. He has over ten years of teaching experience, and has been a Computer Science Instructor at Mount St. Josephs High School in Baltimore, Anne Arundel Community College, Virginia Tech University, and Radford University, among other colleges. Most recently, Mr. Lupoli was an Assistant Professor at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC).

“When I was teaching at Virginia Tech and Radford, I fell in love with the University atmosphere,” he says, which is what drew him to the lecturer position at UMBC. “For me professionally, there are more opportunities here than I would ever have at a community college,” he adds. Mr. Lupoli sees teaching at UMBC as a welcome challenge, and hopes to eventually expand his teaching to subjects such as operating systems and data structures.

This Fall, Mr. Lupoli will teach CMSC 201 (Introduction to Computer Science) and CMSC 104 (Problem Solving and Computer Programming). Eager to get the semester started, Mr. Lupoli says one of his goals for the Fall is to get settled in and get used to the nuances of UMBC. But, the success of his students is his ultimate concern, says Mr. Lupoli, who explains that one of his favorite things about teaching is seeing the "I got it" light turn on in a student's head.  “I strive to make the students understand,” says Mr. Lupoli, “I strive for student success.”

Today is traditional day we celebrate and honor wi-fi in the US: 8.02.11. In other parts of the world it is celebrated on February eighth.

Today is traditional day we celebrate and honor wi-fi in the US: 8.02.11. In other parts of the world it is celebrated on February eighth.

MS thesis defense

A Fast Fullchip Transient Response Estimation Technique

Sushmita K. Rao

11:00am Monday, 25 July 2011, ITE 346

Circuit Simulation has long been a dependable technique for design engineers for functional testing before a circuit is taken to silicon. But as we move into very deep sub-micron technologies, chips are becoming more complex and denser. The dense power grid adds to long simulation run time rendering fullchip simulations difficult and computationally expensive for larger designs. Some large designs may not be simulatable owing to system requirements. Even fast simulators like Cadence UltraSim fail to provide SPICE level accuracy. Dynamic solutions provide greater accuracy than statistical techniques but long simulation run time becomes the biggest tradeoff. Accurate measurement of dynamic currents is required for applications like power estimation, supply noise predictions and in verifying the power grid designs and testing. The research reported in this thesis is focussed on providing a current based method to estimate a fullchip's transient response without carrying out a fullchip simulation. Instead, a part of the chip is simulated and the power port currents thus measured are used to estimate the fullchip currents using the principle of superposition. This technique eliminates fullchip simulations that are complex and time consuming but the accuracy is maintained as the fullchip estimation is carried out on simulated data. A simple scaling method is also proposed to compensate for resistive variations in the test circuits. Experimental results reported demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.

Committee members:

• Dr. Chintan Patel (Chair)
• Dr. Ryan Robucci
• Dr. Tinoosh Mohsenin