Ada Poon @ Stanford

“Smart Operation of Smart Grid”
April 23 – Packard 101 – 4:05pm
Felix Wu
Emeritus Professor, University of California at Berkeley
Professor, University of Hong Kong

“Smart Grid – Analytics and Information Integration”
April 27 – Packard 202 – 4:05pm
Edwin Liu
Vice President of Smart Grid, Quanta Technology

“California Smart Grid Study”
May 6 – Packard 101 – 4:05pm
Angela Chuang
Senior Project Manager, EPRI

“Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM)”
May 15 – Packard 202 – 4:05pm
Mesut Baran
Professor, North Carolina State University

Most homes waste considerable amounts of energy, but solutions such as replacing appliances and renovating buildings are prohibitively expensive, and few people are vigilant about unplugging unused equipment and turning off lights. Econetix is developing a home energy kit that’s easy to install and will theoretically save enough energy to pay for itself in about a year.

The kit includes a “smart” thermostat that automatically optimizes heating and cooling, remote-controlled light switches that install into sockets rather than walls, and power strips that turn off standby power to unused devices. All of the kit’s elements can be controlled from a Web … Continue Reading

Electricity seems to be getting smarter. As utility and software companies band together to make the smart grid a burgeoning reality, electric cars are quietly and efficiently taking people to and from work. But as our homes and cars get smarter, are people getting any smarter about energy use?

We tried to answer this question when we developed the SmartSwitch, a dimmer switch equipped with a network connection and a miniature brake pad. The switch provides tactile feedback about the amount of energy being used either within your household or by the electrical grid as a whole. Our goal with this … Continue Reading

Below is a video from a talk given by Princeton Ph.D. in architecture candidate, Molly Wright Steenson. Ms. Steenson’s talk presents a very interesting retrospective of cybernetic theory, tracing the role of boredom in systems. Of particular interest, is the suggestion that creating highly intuitive systems should not be the ultimate goal of systems designers. Though intuitive considerations certainly improve general usability of a system, if relied on solely, highly intuitive systems can result in users taking passive roles within the system, ultimately leading to … Continue Reading