August 2022 ACM SIGEnergy Newsletter

Content

  1. ACM eEnergy’22 – Summary notes from co-chairs
  2. ACM BuildSys’22 -Updates
  3. EIR – Updates
  4. Call for papers –  FATEsys
  5. Call for participation: DACH+ Conference on Energy Informatics
  6. Call for papers –  RLEM’22
  7. CityLearn Challenge 2022 Launched
  8. ACM SIGEnergy resource for energy-related data sets
  9. Posting additional information

1. ACM eEnergy’22 — Summary notes from co-chairs

With the pandemic still ongoing and the outlook for 2022 unclear, we decided early on that e-Energy 2022 will again be organized as a virtual conference. Early on, we recognized that virtual formats will endure beyond the current pandemic, building and sustaining communities with purely virtual conferences is challenging. For this reason, e-Energy’22 has become a community-organized event with an international committee led by General Chairs Sebastian Lehnhoff (University of Oldenburg), Dan Wang (Hong Kong Polytechnic), and David Irwin (UMass) including a tight operational integration of the 
Steering Committee as well as other international active members of our community. The preparation of the technical program of ACM e-Energy 2022 was coordinated by Adam Wierman from Caltech, Na Li from Harvard University, and Julian de Hoog from the University of Melbourne. We are grateful to the TPC members, who participated in the review process, with their competence and skills at the service of our community. The best paper selection process was organized with great care by Hartmut Schmeck from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

We thank our great keynote speakers Vijay Janapa Reddi, Carole Jean Wu and Giorgio Cortiana for their inspiring talks, which are available online at:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuUH8aHNchaTPUrvsqxPW1A

Last but not least, thanks to all attendees, authors and speakers for sharing their time, experience, and knowledge – we are looking forward to meet all of you again at FCRC 2023.

2. ACM BuildSys’22 – updates

The 9th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys 2022) will host a highly selective, single-track forum for research on systems issues covering all aspects of the built environment, broadly defined.

Advances in the effective integration of networked sensors, building controls, and physical infrastructure are transforming our society, allowing the formation of unprecedented built environments and interlocking physical, social, cyber challenges. Moreover, built environments, including buildings and critical urban infrastructure, account for over half of societys energy consumption and are the mainstay of our nation’s economy, security and health. As a result, there is a broad recognition that systems optimizing explicitly for the built environment are particularly important in improving our society, and represent the foundation for emerging “smart cities”.

Important Dates:
Paper Notification: September 2nd, 2022

Conference date and location: November 9-10, 2022, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
More information:  http://buildsys.acm.org/2022/

3. EIR – Updates

ACM SIGENERGY Energy Informatics Review (EIR) is a new online publication venue for articles on topics within the SIG’s field of interest. It seeks high-quality papers at the intersection of computing and communication technologies with smart and sustainable energy systems and the built infrastructure.

The next submission deadline is September 1, 2022.
Please check the following link for submission deadlines and other information: https://energy.acm.org/eir/call-for-papers/

4. CFP – Second ACM SIGEnergy Workshop on Fair, Accountable, Transparent, and Ethical (FATE) AI for Smart Environments and Energy Systems (FATEsys)

Ubiquitous networked sensing, smart control, and efficient communication technologies have enabled “big” data generation which has led to an unprecedented adoption and growth of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in the transformation of smart energy systems. ML/AI driven solutions are attaining new levels of accuracy and energy-efficiency for several problems related to smart energy systems. For the same reason, AI is anticipated to play an important role in achieving the goals of energy equity and environmental justice. However, while developing these models, it is equally important to hold the models accountable for the impact of their actions on humans in the loop. The second workshop on FATE of AI-Enabled Smart Energy Systems intends to foster discussion on both aspects of this topic and bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds to discuss challenges and breakthroughs in this multidisciplinary area of research.

Website: https://fatesys.github.io/2022/
CFP flyer: https://fatesys.github.io/2022/FATEsys22_CFP.pdf

Important dates:
Paper submission: August 28, 2022 (AOE)
Notifications: September 30, 2022 (AOE)
Camera-ready: October 7, 2022 (AOE)
Workshop: November 9-10, 2022

5- Call for participation: 11th DACH+ Conference on Energy Informatics, Sep 15-16, 2022 in Freiburg, Germany

The DACH+ Conference on Energy Informatics will be held in Freiburg this year, and has a single track format with highly selective contributions. It promotes the research, development, and implementation of information and communication technologies in the energy domain and to fostering the exchange between academia, industry, and service providers in the German-Austrian-Swiss region and its neighbouring countries, and beyond (DACH+).

The program can be found here: https://energy-informatics2022.org/program/
Registration is open here: https://energy-informatics2022.org/registration/

Important Dates
Doctoral Workshop: Sep 14, 2022 (selected participants only)
Conference: Sep 15-16, 2022

6- CFP – Third SIGEnergy Workshop for Reinforcement Learning for Energy Management (RLEM’22)

Buildings account for 40% of the global energy consumption and 30% of the associated greenhouse gas emissions, while also offering a 50–90% CO2 mitigation potential. The transportation sector is responsible for an additional 30%. Optimal decarbonization requires electrification of end-uses and concomitant decarbonization of electricity supply, efficient use of electricity for lighting, space heating, cooling and ventilation (HVAC), and domestic hot water generation, and upgrade of the thermal properties of buildings. A major driver for decarbonization are integration of renewable energy systems (RES) into the grid, and photovoltaics (PV) and solar-thermal collectors as well as thermal and electric storage into residential and commercial buildings. Electric vehicles (EVs), with their storage capacity and inherent connectivity, hold a great potential for integration with buildings.

The integration of these technologies must be done carefully to unlock their full potential. Artificial intelligence is regarded as a possible pathway to orchestrate these complexities of Smart Cities. In particular, (deep) reinforcement learning algorithms have seen an increased interest and have demonstrated human expert level performance in other domains, e.g., computer games. Research in the building and cities domain has been fragmented and with focus on different problems and using a variety of frameworks. The purpose of this Workshop is to build a growing community around this exciting topic, provide a platform for discussion for future research direction, and share common frameworks.

RLEM’22 will be co-located with ACM BuildSys’22
Website: http://www.rlem-workshop.net

7- CityLearn Challenge 2022 Launched

The CityLearn Challenge is a hackathon to investigate the potential of artificial intelligence and distributed behind the meter control systems to tackle multiple problems within the energy domain. You can sign up your team and get started on https://www.aicrowd.com/challenges/neurips-2022-citylearn-challenge (the warmup phase ends August 15, the competition lasts until October 30).

The task this year is to control a set of electrical batteries in 17 single family homes (with PV) to reduce electricity costs and grid emissions from the operation of the homes. The gym environment for this challenge is based on a real net zero energy neighborhood case study from California, the data are provided by EPRI. Any method can be applied, RL or MPC. As the competition progresses, the agents are evaluated on more and more unknown buildings, with increasing weight on the unknown (private dataset).

Prizes this year include:

  • Total of USD 15,000 in prize money sponsored by EPRI
  • Travel grants to ACM BuildSys/e-Energy sponsored by ACM SIGEnergy
  • Presentation of the results at NeurIPS 2022 (virtual)
  • Co-authorship of the solutions paper

8. ACM SIGEnergy resource for energy-related data sets

The ACM SIGEnergy website has a Resources page with a variety of data sets freely available for use by the energy community. It is available at https://energy.acm.org/resources/

We invite each of you to share any energy-related data sets, models, and software that we haven’t added to this page. Please send this information directly to Omid Ardakanian at [email protected].

9. Posting additional information

If you would like to post additional information such as academic job opportunities, Ph.D. scholarships, or a new energy systems course, then please send me the details and I will include them in the next monthly newsletter. My email address is [email protected].

As always, the ACM SIGEnergy website has the latest information. We welcome you to peruse it https://energy.acm.org/

Yashar Ghiassi-Farrokhfal,
Communications Director, ACM SIGEnergy