The world is increasingly experiencing a strong need for energy consumption reduction and a need for efficient use of scarce natural resources. Official studies report that buildings account for the largest portion of the world’s energy expenditure and have the fastest growth rate. Clearly, energy saving strategies that target energy use in buildings and surroundings can have a major impact worldwide, driving the current energy market toward self-sufficiency and self-sustainability. This calls for effective techniques and methods that enable accurate carbon footprinting, monitoring and control of appliance activity, energy auditing and management in buildings and surroundings, and the generation of energy awareness.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play a key role in enabling energy-saving systems in buildings and surrounding spaces by providing a reliable, cost-effective and extensible solution that can be placed in existing as well as new structures and can be controlled via the Internet. In fact, WSNs allow the monitoring of the energy consumption in near-real time and, as such, they are an essential tool in the control loop that will be used in future structures for the generation and usage of diverse types of energy. Today, with the popularity of the smartphones and the proliferation of ubiquitous sensors, the building and campus energy community has the unprecedented opportunity to harness new contexts, and tightly integrate monitoring, services, and control with building occupants. BuildSys is a venue for incubating these new and exciting directions.

Award winners
Best Paper – Winner
Collaborative Energy Conservation in a Microgrid
Mohit Jain, Harshad Khadilkar, Neha Sengupta, and Zainul Charbiwala (IBM Research), Kushan U Tennakoon and Rodzay bin Haji Abdul Wahab (Institute for Biodiversity & Environmental Research, UBD), Liyanage Chandratilak De Silva (Universiti Brunei Darussalam), and Deva P. Seetharam (IBM Research)

Best Paper – Runners up
Minimizing Electricity Costs by Sharing Energy in Sustainable Microgrids
Zhichuan Huang and Ting Zhu (University of Maryland, Baltimore County), Yu Gu (IBM Research-Austin), and David Irwin, Aditya Mishra, and Prashant Shenoy (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

PowerPlay: Creating Virtual Power Meters through Online Load Tracking
Sean Barker (Bowdoin College) and Sandeep Kalra, David Irwin, and Prashant Shenoy (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Best Presentation
Piloteur: A Lightweight Platform for Pilot Studies of Smart Homes
John Feminella (Independently Affiliated) and Devika Pisharoty and Kamin Whitehouse (University of Virginia)

Best Demo/Poster
NILMTK v0.2: A Non-intrusive Load Monitoring Toolkit for Large Scale Data Sets
Jack Kelly (Imperial College London), Nipun Batra (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, India), Oliver Parson (University of Southampton), Haimonti Dutta (CCLS Columbia), William Knottenbelt (Imperial College London), Alex Rogers (University of Southampton), Amarjeet Singh (Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, India), and Mani Srivastava (UCLA)

Automated Diagnostics for AHU-VAV Systems Using Pattern Matching
Adam Regnier, Jin Wen, and Jesse Schwakoff (Drexel University)

Paper submission

BuildSys submission site for regular and short papers is open now at http://128.97.93.166/papers/