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.

Electronic downloads

• http://www.src.org/library/publication/p069217/. (Publication uploaded to SRC website.)
• http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2565585.2565607

• 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.