Title: Cyber-Physical Approaches to Sustainable Energy Systems

Speaker:
Dr. Rui Tan
Research Scientist, Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC), University of Illinois Research Center in Singapore

Time&Location:
Friday, March 7, 11am in EB3105

Abstract:
In the era of smart power grids, modern information and communication technologies are used to enhance the grid sustainability by improving energy use efficiency and system resilience to unexpected faults and malicious attacks. Wireless energy auditing is such an emerging technology for energy efficiency improvement. Specifically, appliances' real-time power consumption data measured by wireless smart plug meters are transmitted to base stations that perform data analytics to support efficiency improvement decisions. This talk will mainly present our ongoing work that aims to achieve fidelity and confidentiality simultaneously for the data collection in wireless energy auditing networks. Due to the limited wireless bandwidth and meter resource constraints, the increased sampling rates and network scales impose significant challenges in achieving metering data fidelity and confidentiality. We exploit the compression and encryption natures of compressive sensing (CS), which is an efficient signal processing scheme, to jointly address these two challenges. Extensive testbed experiments based on a smart plug platform show that our CS approach achieves lower data distortions and boosts the number of meters supported by a base station, compared with several plausible baseline approaches. This talk will also briefly present our recent projects on the resilience of smart grids to unexpected physical faults in electric transmission systems and malicious cyber attacks against electricity pricing systems.

Bio:
Rui Tan is now a Research Scientist at Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC), a Singapore-based research center established by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He also holds a joint appointment with Coordinated Science Laboratory of UIUC as a Principle Research Affiliate. Dr. Tan has broad research interests in networked/embedded/sensing systems and cyber-physical systems, with current focuses on the serviceability and security of smart power grids. Before joining ADSC in 2012, he was a Research Associate at Michigan State University, where he conducted interdisciplinary research on applying wireless sensor systems for various applications such as real-time volcano monitoring and aquatic process monitoring. He received his Ph.D. degree from City University of Hong Kong in 2010. He was awarded the Outstanding Academic Performance Award from CityU HK in 2009 and Best Paper Runner-Up at IEEE PerCom 2013.

Host:
Dr. Guoliang Xing