Grid Watch: Mapping Blackouts with Smart Phones
Noah Klugman, Javier Rosa, Pat Pannuto, Matthew Podolsky, William Huang, Prabal Dutta

Citation
Noah Klugman, Javier Rosa, Pat Pannuto, Matthew Podolsky, William Huang, Prabal Dutta. "Grid Watch: Mapping Blackouts with Smart Phones". HotMobile'14: The 15th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 26, February, 2014.

Abstract
The power grid is one of humanity's most significant engineering undertakings and it is essential in developed and developing nations alike. Currently, transparency into the power grid relies on utility companies and more fine-grained insight is provided by costly smart meter deployments. We claim that greater visibility into power grid conditions can be provided in an inexpensive and crowd-sourced manner independent of utility companies by leveraging existing smartphones. Our key insight is that an unmodified smartphone can detect power outages by monitoring changes to its own power state, locally verifying these outages using a variety of sensors that reduce the likelihood of false power outage reports, and corroborating actual reports with other phones through data aggregation in the cloud. The proposed approach enables a decentralized system that can scale, potentially providing researchers and concerned citizens with a powerful new tool to analyze the power grid and hold utility companies accountable for poor power quality. This paper demonstrates the viability of the basic idea, identifies a number of challenges that are specific to this application as well as ones that are common to many crowd-sourced applications, and highlights some improvements to smartphone operating systems that could better support such applications in the future.

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Citation formats  
  • HTML
    Noah Klugman, Javier Rosa, Pat Pannuto, Matthew Podolsky,
    William Huang, Prabal Dutta. <a
    href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/243.html"
    >Grid Watch: Mapping Blackouts with Smart
    Phones</a>, HotMobile'14: The 15th International
    Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 26,
    February, 2014.
  • Plain text
    Noah Klugman, Javier Rosa, Pat Pannuto, Matthew Podolsky,
    William Huang, Prabal Dutta. "Grid Watch: Mapping
    Blackouts with Smart Phones". HotMobile'14: The 15th
    International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and
    Applications, 26, February, 2014.
  • BibTeX
    @inproceedings{KlugmanRosaPannutoPodolskyHuangDutta14_GridWatchMappingBlackoutsWithSmartPhones,
        author = {Noah Klugman and Javier Rosa and Pat Pannuto and
                  Matthew Podolsky and William Huang and Prabal Dutta},
        title = {Grid Watch: Mapping Blackouts with Smart Phones},
        booktitle = {HotMobile'14: The 15th International Workshop on
                  Mobile Computing Systems and Applications},
        day = {26},
        month = {February},
        year = {2014},
        abstract = {The power grid is one of humanity's most
                  significant engineering undertakings and it is
                  essential in developed and developing nations
                  alike. Currently, transparency into the power grid
                  relies on utility companies and more fine-grained
                  insight is provided by costly smart meter
                  deployments. We claim that greater visibility into
                  power grid conditions can be provided in an
                  inexpensive and crowd-sourced manner independent
                  of utility companies by leveraging existing
                  smartphones. Our key insight is that an unmodified
                  smartphone can detect power outages by monitoring
                  changes to its own power state, locally verifying
                  these outages using a variety of sensors that
                  reduce the likelihood of false power outage
                  reports, and corroborating actual reports with
                  other phones through data aggregation in the
                  cloud. The proposed approach enables a
                  decentralized system that can scale, potentially
                  providing researchers and concerned citizens with
                  a powerful new tool to analyze the power grid and
                  hold utility companies accountable for poor power
                  quality. This paper demonstrates the viability of
                  the basic idea, identifies a number of challenges
                  that are specific to this application as well as
                  ones that are common to many crowd-sourced
                  applications, and highlights some improvements to
                  smartphone operating systems that could better
                  support such applications in the future.},
        URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/243.html}
    }
    

Posted by Barb Hoversten on 22 Jan 2014.

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