SCE congratulates Professors Yugi Lee and ZhiQiang Chen! They have been awarded a 2012 research grant from the IBM Smarter Planet Faculty Innovation Program. Today’s Smart Grid, as an ‘Energy Internet’, holds the promise of transforming the behavior of individuals and communities towards more efficient and greener use of electric power but currently technological gaps exist that prevent achieving such a grand vision, especially in underserved communities and public-domain facilities. Yet technologies have not yet been realized that can provide i) non-intrusive monitoring of energy consumption and behavior at multiple scales, ii) autonomous energy saving mechanisms that are transparent to general users, iii) intelligent prediction of energy costs and expenditures, and iv) evaluation of personalized experiences of smart grid-enabled life at both residence and community levels.

Their project will develop an innovative curriculum at UMKC, titled Smart Sensing and Computing for Smarter Energy. The course is designed for students with a CSEE or CME major at the advanced level of study (senior or graduate level). In the course, interdisciplinary teams and projects were developed to devise and implement novel concepts and solutions that attempt to mitigate the above technological gaps. Ultimately, we envision that the students from this class will be instrumental towards realizing smart grid-enabled smarter buildings, communities, and cities. This is the second IBM Smarter Planet award SCE faculty have received. Dr. Praveen Rao received a 2011 IBM Smart Planet Faculty Innovation Award to develop a new curriculum for health informatics, Towards Smarter Healthcare: New Healthcare IT Curriculum.