Jay Taneja

University of Massachusetts Amherst | UMass Amherst · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Critical infrastructure, such as roads and electricity, are core systems that enable economic development. However, these crucial systems are frequently under-monitored in developing regions, resulting in lost opportunities for growth. Recent advances in remote sensing and machine learning have enabled monitoring and measurement of infrastructure f...

Climate change induced extreme weather events will increase in intensity and frequency, leading to longer and widespread electricity outages. As an example, Winter Storm Uri in Texas left over 4.5 million customers without power between 14 and 18 February, 2021. The social justice consequences of these events remain an outstanding question, as outa...

Purpose of Review Even with increasing electricity access rates, electricity consumption remains low in Sub-Saharan Africa. To remedy this, policies and strategies to stimulate electricity demand are increasingly critical to ensure socio-economic development in the region. This review summarizes approaches to stimulating electricity demand in diffe...

Off-grid electricity systems have burgeoned across Africa recently, extending electricity access to rural communities. With the accelerated adoption of mini-grids and solar home systems, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how their customer bases consume and spend on electricity. Using a novel data set of hourly electricity consump...

Governments and international organizations the world over are investing towards the goal of achieving universal energy access for improving socio-economic development. However, in developing settings, monitoring electrification efforts is typically inaccurate, infrequent, and expensive. In this work, we develop and present techniques for high-reso...

A global push to achieve universal electricity access, paired with drastic reductions in the cost of decentralized electricity technologies, has led to significant research on how best to roll out access to rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Various geospatial electrification models have been developed to aid the decision-making process consi...

What challenges arise when deploying a novel technology at increasing scale? This case study details our experience developing and deploying technologies to monitor power outages and voltage fluctuations at high temporal and geographic frequency. After a small initial pilot, our deployment grew over time and eventually exceeded 450 sensors and 3500...

Complicated systems are complicated to monitor. The electric grid is one of the most complicated systems, and subsequently goes under-monitored in many regions around the world that cannot easily afford expensive meters. However, the electric grid is also critical for sustaining a high quality of life, and requires better monitoring than is often a...

The VIIRS day/night band (DNB) high gain stage (HGS) pixel effective dwell time is in the range of 2–3 milliseconds (ms), which is about one third of the flicker cycle present in lighting powered by alternating current. Thus, if flicker is present, it induces random fluctuations in nightly DNB radiances. This results in increased variance in DNB te...

In low-income settings, the most critical piece of information for electric utilities is the anticipated consumption of a customer. Electricity consumption assessment is difficult to do in settings where a significant fraction of households do not yet have an electricity connection. In such settings the absolute levels of anticipated consumption ca...

Data is often scarce when it relates to the development of electricity infrastructure in economies. Using geographic information system (GIS) databases has become standard practice, but information digitization, data collection, and aggregation at scale can be costly and take years. Researchers are looking for clever solutions for instances where d...

India is known to have unstable power supply, and many locations show an annual cycle in VIIRS Nighttime Light (VNL). In this study, autocorrelation function (ACF) analysis is used to identify the annual cycling in VNL. Two fundamentally different classification techniques are proposed to classify the ACF profile into one of the three arch types, i...

A consistently processed annual global nighttime lights time series (2012–2019) was produced using monthly cloud-free radiance averages made from low light imaging day/night band (DNB) data collected by the NASA/NOAA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The processing steps are modified from the original methods developed to produce a...

Due to the ubiquitous nature of smartphones, opportunistic phone-based crowdsensing has emerged as an important sensing modality. Since fine-grain ambient temperature measurements are a pre-requisite for energy-efficient operation of heating and cooling (HVAC) systems in buildings, in this paper, we use mobile phone sensing in conjunction with a we...

Solar mini-grids are a key element in strategies to achieve universal access to modern energy by 2030. In many settings mini-grids offer a combination of affordability, reliability, and capacity for productive use of power, moreso than most solar home systems and some central grids. Yet the economic sustainability of mini-grids relies on achieving...

Electric power services are fundamental to prosperity and economic development. Disruptions in the electricity power service can range from minutes to days. Such events are common in many developing economies, where the power generation and delivery infrastructure is often insufficient to meet demand and operational challenges. Yet, despite the lar...

We demonstrate GridInSight, a suite of techniques that leverage low-cost, non-intrusive, and commodity smartphone and machine vision cameras to measure electricity grids. Specifically, we develop techniques to measure electricity grid frequency, phase (indoors), and phase (outdoors) across a mix of cameras with errors of 1-2%, 2-5%, and 3-10%, resp...

This paper introduces a novel technique to measure indoor ambient air temperature using the battery temperature sensor found on typical smartphones. We develop physics-based models to predict ambient air temperature that consider the many warming and cooling scenarios faced by phones and account for the excess heat generated by smartphone component...

Power systems have evolved following a century-old paradigm of planning and operating a grid based on large central generation plants connected to load centers through a transmission grid and distribution lines with radial flows. This paradigm is being challenged by the development and diffusion of modular generation and storage technologies. We us...

The smartphone is an incredible computing platform. Loaded with powerful processing, vast data storage, near-global connectivity, built-in batteries, and a rich array of sensors, these devices reliably service the needs of billions of users every day. However, when tasked to run just a single application continuously without any human interaction,...

High-quality roads are the scaffolding for prosperous and healthy societies, and accordingly garner huge investments from governments every year. However, current techniques to monitor those investments tend to be time-consuming, laborious, and expensive, placing them out of reach for many developing regions. In this work, we develop a model for mo...

The vision of sensor systems that collect critical and previously ungathered information about the world is often only realized when sensors, students, and subjects move outside the academic laboratory. However, deployments at even the smallest scales introduce complexities and risks that can be difficult for a research team to anticipate. Over the...

The deployment of solar home systems -- consisting of a photovoltaic panel, battery, and a few appliances -- is increasing rapidly in low- and middle-income economies. The simplicity of these systems has made them easy to deploy for customers without access to electricity who are far from centralized grids. However, sizing of solar PVs and storage...

Incentives are a key facet of human studies research, yet the state-of-the-art often designs and implements incentive systems in an ad-hoc, on-demand manner. We introduce the first vocabulary for formally describing incentive systems and develop a software infrastructure that enables UI-based graphical generation of complex, auditable, reliable, an...

The rapid expansion of intermittent grid-tied solar capacity is making the job of balancing electricity’s real-time supply and demand increasingly challenging. Recent work proposes mechanisms for actively controlling solar power in the grid at individual sites by enabling software to cap it as a fraction of its time-varying maximum output. However,...

Network connectivity is often one of the most challenging aspects of deploying sensors. In many countries, cellular networks provide the most reliable, highest bandwidth, and greatest coverage option for Internet access. While this makes smartphones a seemingly ideal platform to serve as a gateway between sensors and the cloud, we find that a devic...

We describe the design, development, and characterization of a system that uses only a commodity smartphone and a consumer fan to measure the voltage of an electricity grid. This system represents the first known example of a system for measuring power quality of an electricity grid without specialized equipment, and can enable those with electrici...

Utilities across the world struggle to accurately measure electricity reliability on their grids; the average utility in a 109-country sample underestimates outages by a factor of 7 (relative to customers). While some utilities are addressing this challenge by installing smart meters, many utilities in emerging economies do not have the technical o...

Access to electricity is a key enabler of social and economic development. However, 1.2 billion people still do not benefit from reliable electricity services. Microgrids have been proposed as a cost-effective means to accelerate access for communities located far from existing grid infrastructure. Scarcity of capital has been a barrier to both on-...

The rapid expansion of intermittent grid-tied solar capacity is making the job of balancing electricity's real-time supply and demand increasingly challenging. To address the problem, recent work proposes mechanisms for actively controlling solar power output to the grid by enabling software to cap it as a fraction of its time-varying maximum outpu...

Background It is widely accepted that electricity is an important element for improving levels of human development and wealth creation in rural areas. Yet, little research has explored the conditions under which electrification could lead to wealth creation post-electrification. Using Kenya as a case study, this paper uses natural capital (NC) and...

Levels of electricity access in sub-Saharan Africa are low with large populations living far from existing electricity infrastructure. This has led to interest in decentralized electrification solutions like microgrids, which can reach remote communities more quickly. To address a lack of capital to deploy these projects, governments have sought pr...

Survey data are often used to measure development outcomes, but can be imprecise, biased, and expensive. Even datasets that manage to meet stringent quality criteria often have limited statistical coverage and are not collected frequently enough to remain relevant. In this work, we develop a method to address the spatial and temporal " gaps " that...

The push to incorporate more renewable sources of generation into electricity grids is forcing a sea change in how grids are composed and managed. The operational task of balancing an electricity grid has grown from a relatively simple, solvable problem to one of great complexity, involving widespread prediction and coordination backed with substan...

Despite substantial gains in the past few decades, 550 million people in sub-Saharan Africa still lack access to electricity. Rural areas present the largest electrification challenge, with access levels below 12% in most countries. Public rural electrification efforts, where undertaken, have generally effected slow and limited change. Further, to...

We develop a flexible and responsive electrical load in the form of domestic refrigerators augmented with a thermal storage system, a wireless sensor network for monitoring and actuation, and a controller that enables response to external controls. Using this, we investigate the potential of such loads for two applications: price-responsive demand...

Electricity grids are transforming as renewables proliferate, yet operational concerns due to fluctuations in renewables sources could limit the ultimate potential for high penetrations of renewables. In this paper, we compare three electricity grids - California, Germany, and Ontario - studying the effects of relative cost of solar and wind genera...

There is enormous potential for building-focused applications to improve operation and sustainability, both for classical uses like modeling or fault detection as well as innovative ones like occupant-driven control or grid-aware energy management. We show that a building application stack - that addresses shortcomings of existing antiquated archit...

Commercial buildings are attractive targets for introducing innovative cyber-physical control systems, because they are already highly instrumented distributed systems which consume large quantities of energy. However, they are not currently programmable in a meaningful sense because each building is constructed with vertically integrated, closed s...

We develop a vignette of an information-rich energy network with flexible and responsive electrical loads in the form of a domestic refrigerator augmented with a thermal storage system and a supply-following controller that responds to the availability of fluctuating renewable sources. We fully characterize our prototype thermal storage-enhanced re...

Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems use a large amount of energy, and so they are an interesting area for efficiency improvements. The focus here is on the use of semiparametric regression to identify models, which are amenable to analysis and control system design, of HVAC systems. This paper briefly describes two testbeds th...

We present insights obtained from conducting a year-long, 455 meter deployment of wireless plug-load electric meters in a large commercial building. We develop a stratified sampling methodology for surveying the energy use of Miscellaneous Electric Loads (MELs) in commercial buildings, and apply it to our study building. Over the deployment period,...

Experimentally comparing the energy usage and comfort characteristics of different controllers in heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems is difficult because variations in weather and occupancy conditions preclude the possibility of establishing equivalent experimental conditions across the order of hours, days, and weeks. This p...

Improving the energy-efficiency of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems has the potential to realize large economic and societal benefits. This paper concerns the system identification of a hybrid system model of a building-wide HVAC system and its subsequent control using a hybrid system formulation of learning-based model pre...

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized as complex distributed systems exhibiting substantial uncertainty due to interactions with the physical world. Today's electric grids are often described as CPS because a portfolio of distributed supplies must be dispatched in real-time to match uncontrolled, uncertain demand while adhering to constrai...

While efforts are underway to expand latrine coverage to an estimated 2.6 billion people who lack access to improved sanitation, there is evidence that actual use of latrines is suboptimal, limiting the potential health and environmental gains from containment of human excreta. We developed a passive latrine use monitor (PLUM) and compared its abil...

Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are an important target for efficiency improvements through new equipment and retrofitting because of their large energy footprint. One type of equipment that is common in homes and some offices is an electrical, single-stage heat pump air conditioner (AC). To study this setup, we have built...

Miscellaneous and electronic loads (MELs) consume about 30% of the electricity used in U.S. commercial buildings, but our understanding of their energy use lags the traditional end-uses. A key component of reducing energy use is understanding how devices are used, but few studies have collected field data on the long-term energy used by a large sam...

Faced with an uncertain path forward to renewables portfolio standard (RPS) goals and the high cost of energy storage, we believe that deep demand side management must be a central strategy to achieve widespread penetration of renewable energy sources. We examine the variability of wind as a source of renewable, non-dispatchable energy and the load...

We describe the design, deployment, and experience with a wireless sensor network for high-fidelity monitoring of electrical usage in buildings. A network of 38 mote-class AC meters, 6 light sensors, and 1 vibration sensor is used to determine and audit the energy envelope of an active labo- ratory. Classic WSN issues of coverage, aggregation, sam-...

A home where every major appliance can be monitored for energy consumption and individually controlled wirelessly has long been a dream of gadgeteers and the green-conscious alike. Research has shown that real-time, per-appliance electricity usage feedback can induce behavior changes that lead to 10% to 20% reduction in usage [2]. We present ACME:...

We present a building block approach to hardware platform design based on a decade of collective experience in this area, arriving at an architecture in which general-purpose modules that require expertise to design and incorporate commonly- used functionality are integrated with application-specic carriers that satisfy the unique sensing, power su...

This paper describes a systematic approach to building micro-solar power subsystems for wireless sensor network nodes. Our approach composes models of the basic pieces - solar panels, regulators, energy storage elements, and application loads - to appropriately select and size the components. We demonstrate our approach in the context of a microcli...

An abstract is not available.

On August 30, 2005, we successfully demonstrated a large-scale, real-time, surveillance and control application on a wireless sensor network. The task was to track multiple human targets walking through a 5041 square meter sensor field and dispatch simulated pursuers to capture them. We employed a multi-target tracking algorithm that was a combinat...

We present the philosophy, design, and initial evaluation of the Trio Testbed, a new outdoor sensor network deploy- ment that consists of 557 solar-powered motes, seven gate- way nodes, and a root server. The testbed covers an area of approximately 50,000 square meters and was in contin- uous operation during the last four months of 2005. This new...

A main challenge with developing applications for wireless embedded systems is the lack of visibility and control during execution of an application. In this paper, we present a tool suite called Marionette that provides the ability to call functions and to read or write variables on pre-compiled, embedded programs at run-time, without requiring th...