Krithivasan Ramamritham

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay | IIT Bombay ·  Department of Computer Science & Engineering

Buildings, viewed as cyber-physical systems, become smart by deploying Building Management Systems (BMS). They should be aware about the state and environment of the building. This is achieved by developing a sensing system that senses different interesting factors of the building, called as “facets of sensing.” Depending on the application, differ...

Artificial intelligence-based techniques applied to the electricity consumption data generated from the smart grid prove to be an effective solution in reducing Non Technical Loses (NTLs), thereby ensures safety, reliability, and security of the smart energy systems. However, imbalanced data, consecutive missing values, large training times, and co...

Artificial intelligence-based techniques applied to the electricity consumption data generated from the smart grid prove to be an effective solution in reducing Non Technical Loses (NTLs), thereby ensures safety, reliability, and security of the smart energy systems. However, imbalanced data, consecutive missing values, large training times, and co...

Residential solar installations are becoming increasingly popular among homeowners. However, renters and homeowners living in shared buildings cannot go solar as they do not own the shared spaces. Community-owned solar arrays and energy storage have emerged as a solution, which enables ownership even when they do not own the property or roof. Howev...

The assessment of people’s perception of surroundings has been given less regard in top-down urban planning approaches. The earlier body of research aimed toward understanding preferences has been quintessential in highlighting modes and methods to appraise urban environments. Related studies have been focused on small-scale experiments based on ev...

The increasing frequency and intensity of disasters pose a big challenge while building resilient cities. Unplanned urbanization has further complicated the matter. In the era of building technology-driven smart cities, there is a lack of effective Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-based disaster management implementation and strategic...

Since the thermal condition of living spaces affects the occupants' productivity and their quality of life, it is important to design effective heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) control strategies for better energy efficiency and thermal comfort. An essential step in HVAC control and energy optimization is thermal comfort modeling. R...

Increasing global building energy demand, with the related economic and environmental impact, upsurges the need for the design of reliable energy demand forecast models. This work presents kCNN-LSTM, a deep learning framework that operates on the energy consumption data recorded at predefined intervals to provide accurate building energy consumptio...

The Government of Nepal lacked a common digital platform for communication among agencies during the response of 2015, Gorkha earthquake. It exposed the weakness in the utilisation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to build the platform, which affected effective information communication for coordination among agencies. Lack of c...

Heterogeneous and mixed urban forms profoundly influence fire susceptibility. Planning interventions to achieve fire resilience in urban areas are often not prioritized, primarily due to lack of analytical evidences. This paper proposes a novel analytical framework to reduce the fire-susceptibility in urban areas through optimal and cost-effective...

Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) sensors are commonly used nowadays for sensing different line parameters of the grid for making it more efficient and reliable. However, they are costly to procure and maintain. Also, they may fail and produce measurements with errors. Towards these issues, a novel optimization model and a polynomial time algorithm are...

Data-driven approaches to computationally manage electricity consumption is envisioned as a standard practice under the smart grid paradigm. The roll out of Advanced Metering Infrastructure provides the necessary push for installation of smart meters for electricity consumers. Since smart meters are capable of measuring at fine temporal resolutions...

This study investigates people's perception of visual and auditory landscapes in a mixed-use urban environment. A set of audio and visual data is collected at different intervals during the day in local streets with the help of an audio recorder and camera setup. The High and Low-level features from the collected audio and visual datasets are captu...

Under the broader aegis of smart grid, the use of Distributed Ledger Technology to promote privacy, trust and security in peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing is gaining attention globally. However, implementation is limited to microgrid or neighbourhood level due to the challenges of scalability and performance associated with increase in number of p...

Fire disasters pose a severe threat to the functionality of the cities and their sustainable development. Lack of analytical approach in research literature hinders the development of a fire-resilient city. A novel analytical framework is proposed in this paper to reduce the overall fire susceptibility of a city through a cost-effective redevelopme...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the factors that might influence the acceptance of government-to-government (G2G) systems in the Government of Nepal (GoN), to enhance the communication for coordination among government agencies. Design/methodology/approach After reviewing the Unified Model for E-Government Acceptance (UMEGA), interviews, focus...

The urban built-up areas while providing shelter inimitably modify the thermal profile of its surroundings which impact the quality of life. Urban heat stress is the most significant indicator of alteration of the urban ecosystem. The variation in built-up areas alters the net radiation budget of urban land surface differently, leading to spatially...

The article addresses the void in developing analytical methods concerning to design urban configurations that could reduce fire risks, and, thus, could help in achieving sustainable goals. A novel algorithm is developed to generate alternative Urban Built Form (UBF) models that could be less susceptible to fire compared to the existing built-form....

Data driven building energy consumption forecasting models play a significant role in enhancing the energy efficiency of the buildings through building energy management, energy operations, and control strategies. The multi-source and heterogeneous energy consumption data necessitates the integration of evolutionary algorithms and data-driven model...

The article aims to analyze the various causes and relationships of fire with the urban pattern. Various spatial analytics and geostatistical techniques are applied to reveal spatiotemporal variations in the datasets. The novel machine learning framework models important variables identified by random forest technique as predictors to develop GWR m...

Emergency Response Services (ERS) in the developing countries often face the challenge of distributing the resources in a manner to provide optimal service. Moreover, the exclusion of heterogeneous urban fabric and considerable variations of travel time and coverage demand throughout the day often leads to inadequate solutions. Hence, we propose an...

Emergency Response Services (ERS) in the developing countries often face the challenge of distributing the resources in a manner to provide optimal service. Moreover, the exclusion of heterogeneous urban fabric and considerable variations of travel time and coverage demand throughout the day often leads to inadequate solutions. Hence, we propose an...

The data generated by many applications is in semi structured format, such as XML. This data can be used for analytics only after shredding and storing it in structured format. This process is known as Extract-Transform-Load or ETL. However, ETL process is often time consuming due to which crucial time-sensitive insights can be lost or they may bec...

A solar PV-battery installation allows grid-connected electricity `prosumers' to engage in peak shaving, load shifting, Demand Response programs, and other grid ancillary services through data-driven energy management. These value streams generate revenue for consumers while assisting utilities in managing the grid. Such cyber-physical systems prov...

The shift towards capacity building and deteriorating governance, may lead to poor service delivery which is a prime challenge for governing agencies. Different countries follow their own sets of governance parameters and often assess the outcome of policies based on them. In order to compose a uniform good governance framework, we have conducted a...

Deep learning (DL) methods have provided several breakthroughs in conventional data analysis techniques, especially with image and audio datasets. Rapid assessment and large-scale quantification of environmental attributes have been possible through such models. This study focuses on the creation of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Recurrent Ne...

While the previous studies have attempted to quantify the environmental characteristics which stimulate different emotions and perceptions, the temporal aspect of the transient urbanscapes and the multimodality in data collection and analysis has not been given enough attention. The characteristics of the urban environment fluctuate with the time,...

Although built-up areas exacerbate the urban heat island (UHI) effect, the thermal impact of heterogeneous urban areas remains unknown. In this study geographically weighted regression (GWR) is used to examine the locally variable relationship between land surface temperatures (LSTs) and urban built form (UBF) indices. Sky view factor, built covera...

Slums provide cheaper workforce and informal services which contribute substantially towards GDP. However, such areas, due to the high population density, sub-standard housing and lack of essential services are urban risks. The socio-physical development of such settlements has often been neglected due to poor laws and provisions in urban managemen...

The thermal profile of the urban built-up area is essential for reducing the impact of built-up areas on urban heat stress. This study quantifies the variations in the outdoor thermal profile of built forms in a heterogeneous urban area. A two-step process was adopted to quantify built form induced heat stress. The build form typologies referred to...

Traditional city planning and design tools require major restructuring. Even with the rapid growth in the availability of mobile communication devices, connectivity, data generation, and analysis tools, the idea of the creation of citizen-centric and smart cities has not been fully conceptualized. Individual perception and preferences toward urban...

Strengthening the Governance through Government to Government (G2G) framework to better communicate among government agencies for Effective Disaster Risk Management in Nepal.

Emergency Response Services (ERS) in the developing countries face a dual challenge of lack of resources and selection of optimal locations to distribute the available resources. Moreover, the exclusion of urban space details in the previous models leads to unfeasible solutions. Due to variations in the travel time and coverage demand throughout th...

Rapid urbanization with haphazard growth pattern often leads to intensification of built-up areas. The built-up areas increase the ambient air temperature and results in heat stress conditions thereby causing adverse health impacts. Therefore, mitigation of urban warming has become a major concern for urban administrators. Accurate identification o...

->20 % yearly increase in fire calls and 40 % increase in high intensity calls, with an average of 59 deaths per day. ->Macro level urban space planning, and lesser focus on fire-driven land use development and redevelopment aspects. -> Heterogeneous nature of urban spaces increases fire vulnerability, especially in developing countries.

The studies in the classification of the urban spatial structure have been essential in deriving insights into the land cover and the built typology which helped in the estimation of energy consumption patterns, urban density, compactness, and hierarchy of settlements. However, the analysis and comparison of the physical forms of the cities have be...

The assessments on human perception of urban spaces are essential for the management and upkeep of surroundings. A large part of the previous studies is dedicated towards the visual appreciation and judgement of various physical features present in the surroundings. Visual qualities of the environment stimulate feelings of safety, pleasure, and bel...

Built-up areas are the major contributors to urban surface heating that modifies the urban energy exchange with its surroundings. This study investigates the intra-urban thermal variations in built-up areas of the highly heterogeneous city of Mumbai through empirical analysis. The heterogeneity in urban areas is caused by variation in both build an...

Urbanization leads to the densification of built-up areas, and thereby increases surface heat island intensity—which is one of the growing concerns in the rapidly urbanizing cities. Another notable aspect of cities like Mumbai is the uncontrolled growth of informal slum housing clusters, which have emerged as a significant urban built form in the l...

Since many residential locations are unsuitable for solar deployments due to space constraints, community-owned solar arrays with energy storage that are collectively shared by a group of homes have emerged as a solution. However, such a group-owned system does not allow individual control over how the electricity generation from the solar array an...

This paper presents a comparative study of the expected changes in load curves of two major cities in India, if their respective rooftop PV potentials are achieved. Rooftop PV potential assessments studies done for the city of Mumbai concluded that the city has around 1.72 GW potential. Based on similar studies, the city of Delhi is reported to hav...

Thermal modeling is necessary if we want to control the thermal environment in a space within a building. Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) equipment are usually installed in a building based on the empirical formula developed by the manufacturers considering the worst case scenarios of heat loss/gain through the walls, the windows a...

Power shortage is a serious issue in developing nations. During periods of high demand, utilities need to motivate the consumers to curtail their consumption for maintaining grid stability and avoiding blackouts or brownouts. Identification of suitable candidates is essential for such events, as the budget set aside by utilities for Demand Response...

Smart meters allow us to track a variety of electrical parameters including voltage. Even though mains voltage is assumed to remain constant, it does vary, albeit within a small range, so the variation is mostly ignored. But we show how the small variations in voltage sensed at different points in the electrical system and the relative variations i...

This paper proposes indicator-based approach to investigate urban heat island (UHI) in urban areas to mitigate its adverse impacts on human well-being like heat stress. UHI investigation becomes exigent in rapidly urbanizing and fast -growing cities like Mumbai, that has high density of population with varied built forms. The uncontrolled growth of...

Land use mix has been studied as a phenomenon as well as the part of policy initiatives towards the creation of vibrant neighbourhoods. It has also been viewed in different perspectives by researchers primarily in economic terms where the presence of complementary land uses supports Transit Oriented Development, Public transportation, encourages st...

In most process control systems nowadays, process measurements are periodically collected and archived in historians. Analytics applications process the data, and provide results offline or in a time period that is considerably slow in comparison to the performance of the manufacturing process. Along with the proliferation of Internet-of-Things (Io...

Among the practitioners in the energy management domain, there is enormous excitement about synthesizing and benefiting from numerous technologies, including real-time monitoring, net metering, demand response, distributed generation from intermittent sources such as solar and wind, active control of power flows, enhanced storage capabilities, and...

Electrical utilities depend on Demand Response programs to manage peak loads by incentivizing consumers to voluntarily curtail a portion of their load during a specified period. Utilities first categorize consumers based on their energy consumption patterns into different clusters and then request consumers of a particular cluster to participate in...

Motivating users to save energy is considered to be the holy grail of smart energy management. However, many studies have shown that changing user behavior from an energy standpoint is a very difficult problem. Furthermore, in countries such as the United States, users do not have sufficient monetary incentives to become energy conscious, given the...

The popularity of rooftop solar for homes is rapidly growing. However, accurately forecasting solar generation is critical to fully exploiting the benefits of locally generated solar energy. In this article, we present two machine-learning techniques to predict solar power from publicly available weather forecasts. We use these techniques to develo...

Using mobile devices to enhance users interaction with CPS has many potential benefits for healthcare applications. Recent research has looked at how to recognize human activities using smartphones, to indicate health status. But little attention has been paid to automatically identify the activity habits of individuals in real-time. Of course, the...

Smart-grid applications have widely varying data needs as well as bandwidth and latency requirements. The usual approach to accumulating the available data (e.g., from Phasor Measurement Units) at a centralized site and executing all the applications there leads to large network latencies. This article proposes techniques where data packets are pri...

Sensor driven building management involves tasks like reducing and optimizing power consumption, monitoring the health of the building appliances, maintaining quality of the atmosphere in the building and tracking occupants in various parts of the building (useful for purposes such as building safety and emergency evacuation) to name a few. This de...

One of the major concerns of sensor signal analytics is missing or incomplete samples. Data misses occur mainly because of delays or faults in data capturing infrastructure. We propose a novel mechanism for missing data imputation. The novelty of our mechanism arises from its exploitation of the semantics of different features of the sensor signal...

Saving energy without causing discomfort and without demanding human intervention is the need of the day. It is important to develop sensor systems which not only satisfy user requirements, but also take energy consumption into consideration. In this demo, we present the sensing subsystems of a Smart Academic Environment, based upon the core concep...

We present the Civique system for emergency detection in urban areas by monitoring micro blogs like Tweets. The system detects emergency related events, and classifies them into appropriate categories like " fire " , " accident " , " earthquake " , etc. We demonstrate our ideas by classifying Twitter posts in real time, visualizing the ongoing even...

Vehicular social networks require real-time communication and are highly dynamic due to vehicle movement. In this article, we present a novel architecture, called VeShare, to support highly dynamic and time-sensitive social behaviors in vehicle networks. VeShare clearly separates a vehicle network into control and data planes. The control plane is...

Sensor driven building management involves tasks like reducing and optimizing power consumption, monitoring the health of the building appliances, maintaining quality of the atmosphere in the building and tracking occupants in various parts of the building (useful for purposes such as building safety and emergency evacuation), to name a few. But, i...

Mega cities like Mumbai are experiencing continuous decline in thermal comfort due to the change in its ecological functions caused by accelerated growth and changes in its built environment. This research conducts an analysis of spatial variation in Built Form types (BFT) of a ward of Mumbai. BFTs are categorised by both their surface properties a...

It is generally argued that the current state of degradation to environment is predominantly due to lack of appropriate human behaviour. Members of the civil society are slowly awakening to the ill-effects of inefficient waste disposal and are trying to contribute to the well-being and maintenance of the world we live in. While rules and regulation...

The use of smart-meters is proliferating, they are now being deployed without asking the obvious question: Do we really need each of them? Beyond the cost of smart-meters, there are overheads related to installation, wiring, etc. To formally tackle this question, we first define the notion of observability that one or more pieces of information (in...

As buildings get smarter they need to be aware of their spaces and occupants to improve prediction and management of energy consumption and environment customization based on user preference. User identification is crucial to this. However, accuracy of identification, intrusiveness and cost are important factors that one considers before installing...

Large imbalance in energy generation and demand is usually handled through load shedding specific areas during different times of a day. Instead of a complete blackout, we have prototyped a brownout energy distribution scheme wherein a pre-determined guaranteed level of power required for essential loads is provided to all consumers. And consumers...

Smart-grid applications have widely varying data needs as well as bandwidth and latency requirements. The usual approach to collecting the available data (e.g., from Phasor Measurement Units) at a centralized site continuously and executing all the applications there leads to large latencies and requirements for high communication bandwidth. This p...