AUS Computer Science and Engineering team declared 2020 winners of prestigious IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Chester Sall Award

Faculty members and graduates of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering from the College of Engineering at American University of Sharjah (AUS) were named the 2020 winners of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Chester Sall Award for the First place best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics 2018.

Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Ali and Dr. Imran Zualkernan, professors of computer science and engineering at AUS, along with three graduates -- Mohammed Rashid, Mazin Alikarar, and Ragini Gupta -- comprised the team. Their paper, entitled “A Smart Home Energy Management System Using Internet of Things (IOT) and Big Data Analytics Approach," focused on how recent computer technologies can be used to provide meaningful information on consumers’ energy needs and inform utilities stakeholder’s decisions.

“We work in the areas of Cyber-physical systems and IoT in the context of smart home monitoring and control. Since air conditioning contributes to 60 percent of energy consumption in Arab Gulf countries, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) units have been taken as a case study to design and implement the proposed energy management system in the paper,” said team member Gupta, who is currently pursuing her PhD at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in the US.

This work is expected to open new avenues for smart energy management in an IoT Platform. “The web-based client application is representative of energy consumption data of home devices across different time granularities for proactive decision making among consumers and utility stakeholders. Additionally, it provides a complete interface for smart home energy management such as remote control of devices, automatic generation of bills, and record generation to view the energy impact of appliances and the related price charged through an end-user mobile application,” added Gupta.

The importance of this paper stems from the fact that it is the first paper that illustrates the complete end-to-end architecture for collecting and reporting on appliance-level energy data in a holistic manner, according to Dr. Zualkarnan.

The project design, implementation and publication took the team two years to achieve. “Setting up the research infrastructure required us to collect and analyze data. This took time,” explained Dr. Al-Ali. The team is now looking at follow-up work that considered additional data and uses data analytics and visualization.

This latest accolade is a reflection of the high quality of work being done by faculty members and students at the university’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. From receiving honors at the Emirates Think Science Competition and Microsoft’s Imagine Cup to MBRSC Space Hackathon Challenge and the ACM/Gulf Programming Contest among many others, the department’s students have made a name for themselves both nationally and internationally.

For more information about the AUS College of Engineering, please visit: www.aus.edu/cen.