Philip Odonkor, a professor in the School of Systems & Engineering, led a team of four students, Ronald Estevez, Samantha Inneo, John Schneiderhan and Daniel Wadler, to secure top awards at the Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences and Engineering Conference (SMC2020) held virtually in August.
Stevens reported that the competition was a “national data challenge for its comprehensive analysis of relationships and patterns in Chicago’s climate, energy usage, building stock and demographics.” The U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory sponsored the SMC2020 which attracted more than 50 university teams to participate.
The research team was awarded the Best Lightning Talk prize for their presentation and runner-up honors for top student paper at the data challenge competition.
When asked what drove him to participate in this competition, Odonkor explained that his research interests have “always been in energy consumption and optimization, so this competition was a natural fit for my team and me.” The team was originally interested in discovering how buildings on the Stevens campus use energy. Odonkor noted that, “As an institution promoting sustainability, this type of information is vital to inform and educate the Stevens community about energy use and conservation.”
However, when COVID-19 hit the Stevens community and the majority of campus shut down, the data collection around energy use was no longer of interest. But shortly afterwards, the team came across a flyer from Oak Ridge National Laboratory regarding the data challenge which pivoted their efforts. Odonkor said the goal of the challenge was to “understand the relationship between the weather and the energy consumption of buildings in the downtown Chicago area.”
All four undergraduate students were challenged and asked to learn as they went. Estevez noted that he learned more about, “relational databases, handling and extracting data from files, and producing visualizations.” Wadler spoke fondly of Estevez’s efforts stating that he “did amazing work with programming and coding different models and simulations.” Wadler additionally explained that, “the competition was heavily revolving around supplied data analysis and simulating and modeling that data.”
Wadler and Estevez both highlighted the challenge of working with people over Zoom whom they had never met before. Estevez said, “online meetings became increasingly important as time progressed and we became better at communicating with each other and gained more understanding of the project.”
Odonkor called attention to another unique challenge the team faced: “trying to process over 3 Gigabytes worth of data on our laptops.” This challenge was the result of the campus shutdown; Odonkor expressed, “this is something which we would have done on a workstation on campus.”
Inneo presented the team’s project which secured a first place finish. Team members complimented Inneo’s strong performance, and Wadler said, “Samantha took on the responsibility of presenting our project (when no one else wanted it) and won us ‘best lightning talk’ at the competition.”
Stevens additionally noted that the team’s work revealed a novel insight that “the northern and southern regions of downtown Chicago differ quite distinctly in building stock, energy usage and energy efficiency, so much so that they constitute what the team calls ‘two halves’: one consisting of tall, energy-efficient structures, the other consisting of buildings lower in height, less efficient and with different mixes of energy sources.”
Odonkor is optimistic that work will be done to understand how buildings on campus use energy. He believes that “we can leverage a lot of what we learned during this year’s project in the future to learn more about how energy works around our campus.” Odonkor also noted a desire to defend the team’s title should Oak Ridge National Labs hold the same challenge next year.
Odonkor and Wadler both recommended that undergraduate students at Stevens consider participating in research projects. Odonkor advised students to, “simply reach out to any of your favorite professors and ask them if they have a project you can work on (I bet you they do!) The experience you get from such opportunities is priceless.” Similarly, Wadler encouraged students to participate in research stating, “You never know where it will take you. I am not and have not been the most ‘go-getter’ person at this school but this was an opportunity that I saw I had and could not turn down.”
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