June 20-23, 2023 – Synoptic Engineering attended the Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC) at the Orlando World Marriott, in furtherance of our societal mission to make our technologies broadly applicable and widely available. A shared aspiration of several team members is interest in applying our technology in the energy and health technology realms exists; both arenas were represented at this conference. Our goals for this event include:

Toward the first goal, we presented a short paper (with long Appendix) regarding Datasheets for Energy Datasets, applying a tool designed for use generally in the AI community to the energy community specifically. The workshop participants agreed that the practice of documenting datasets to promote ethical considerations is a good one, and could be supported through the repositories that are already in existence.

Regarding obstacles in the energy and connected health communities that relate to radio communications, there seems to be opportunity to think about how to expand sensor lifetime and communication range for ad hoc sensor networks in buildings and across grids.

The e-Energy conference was about Energy Informatics. There is an active community of people thinking about automated ways to control energy distribution and use, from the level of building HVAC systems to regional grid systems. The research centers on how to optimize over variables like cost to consumer, cost to generator, comfort of building occupants, and carbon impact. Some of these are taking into account human behavior, and some are more about game theoretical approximations. The datasets for all of this work are difficult to come by, but improving in size and availability.

Connected Health, Too

Co-located with this overall Federated Computing Research Conference was the “Connected Health: Applications, Systems, and Engineering Technologies Conference”. Interesting presentations included those about monitoring respiration rate with an RF signal, or using acoustic smartphone capabilities, and some other smartphone-based diagnostic work. These solutions help avoid invasive procedures and reduce the use of sometimes-problematic wearable diagnostics.

A few papers that touch on ideas Synoptic has discussed in recent months:

Next Steps

The energy researchers were optimistic that low-power communications would be useful in ad-hoc networks of sensors that inform their systems-level automation.  A good next step for Synoptic is to learn more about the market for sensors used in that domain, and what kind of wireless communications are in use, then brainstorm about how we could improve battery life, for instance, by sending lower powered communications with our expertise and unique capabilities.

An international conference

The e-Energy conference is popular among German researchers, who were open to discussing all forms of research and careers in research. From the greater conference – sessions shared the mealtimes and coffee breaks – were a few Israeli researchers, and people coming in from the UK, and students from around the world studying in the US. One of the more interesting histories was from a fellow who was born in Australia, moved to Germany as a teenager to study dance, and has lived there since – now close to completing his PhD in energy informatics. In his lab are people studying medical device engineering, fish hearts, and insect classification- quite a diversity of study!