design

Smart Meter Data-Driven Load Forecasting and Price Design in the Retail Market

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KAUST

The widespread popularity of smart meters enables an immense amount of fine-grained smart meter data to be collected. Meanwhile, the deregulation of the power industry, particularly on the delivery side, has continuously been moving forward worldwide. Electricity retailer is one of the main participants in the retail market. This presentation will discuss how an electricity retailer can increase the competitiveness in the retail market by making full use of the fine-grained smart meter data. Since load forecasting is fundamental for various businesses of the retailer, the first part of this presentation will study how to enhance the performance of aggregated load forecasting using the fine-grained smart meter data. Designing customizing prices is an effective way to promote consumer interactions and increase customer stickiness for retailers. The second part of this presentation will introduce a novel data-driven approach for incentive-compatible customizing time-of-use (ToU) price design so that the benefits of both the retailer and consumers can be gained.

Advancing Visual Intelligence via Neural System Design

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KAUST

Building intelligent visual systems is essential for the next generation of artificial intelligence systems. It is a fundamental tool for many disciplines and beneficial to various potential applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, surveillance, augmented reality, to name a few. An accurate and efficient intelligent visual system has a deep understanding of the scene, objects, and humans. It can automatically understand the surrounding scenes. In general, 2D images and 3D point clouds are the two most common data representations in our daily life. Designing powerful image understanding and point cloud processing systems are two pillars of visual intelligence, enabling the artificial intelligence systems to understand and interact with the current status of the environment automatically. In this talk, I will first present our efforts in designing modern neural systems for 2D image understanding, including high-accuracy and high-efficiency semantic parsing structures, and unified panoptic parsing architecture. Then, we go one step further to design neural systems for processing complex 3D scenes, including semantic-level and instance-level understanding. Further, we show our latest works for unified 2D-3D reasoning frameworks, which are fully based on self-attention mechanisms. In the end, the challenges, up-to-date progress, and promising future directions for building advanced intelligent visual systems will be discussed.

Advances in Microelectromechanical Digital Circuit Design: Low Power Computation, Sensing and Beyond

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KAUST

Electromechanical switches were the core elements of the very first digital computers in early 20th century. While these switches were later replaced by the smaller, faster and more reliable "transistor" technology, they found a new life following the development of nanofabrication tools and Micro-electromechannical Systems (MEMS). In this seminar we will explore the most recent advances in the field of MEMS-based digital circuit and sensor design. We also examine the application of MEMS switches and resonators in building the most important blocks of a digital system, namely adders, multipliers, data converters, sequential and combinational complex logic, and discuss the future of this technology in the beyond-CMOS era.