Let’s TAC™ About It: K-Anonymity

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For the fifth installment of our blog series, we will cover TAC™’s k-anonymity functionality. So, are you ready to TAC™ about it?

Regulators are increasingly demanding that utilities release their data to third parties to support a wide array of clean energy initiatives. At the same time, regulators are also mandating increased information privacy and security requirements like with CCPA and GDPR.

The data about a consumer’s energy behavior can provide enormous insights for efficiency but, of course, they can also reveal private details like vacation habits, income levels, family size, etc.

How can utilities balance these two reasonable but competing requirements? 

VIA has implemented a k-anonymity function to handle this use case. The essence of k-anonymity is to segment the data in such a way that similar consumers are in groups that are both big enough to hide an individual consumer’s behavior and small enough to be meaningful and useful for analysis and creating energy efficiency programs.

The above images show two normally distributed variables with 1,000 points. Each cross indicates one point. There can be several points at each location on top of each other. The second image shows the points grouped with at least 15 points within each group. The groups are smaller and more frequent in the middle because there are more points located in the middle due to the normal distributions.

K-anonymity algorithms are sometimes referred to as Mondrian algorithms due to the groupings resembling the paintings of Piet Mondrian.

Choosing an optimal grouping size is not just a challenge, it is actually an NP-hard mathematical problem. TAC™ now provides a simple function to allow utilities to implement k-anonymity groupings to meet both regulator constraints. When a utility chooses this function, any request of data must meet specific group size constraints. If not enough data exists to create a set of data that would maintain data privacy (e.g., only one consumer meets the specific request), then the utility does not provide the data. Similarly, if a data request is made where there is more than enough data to maintain an individual’s privacy, smaller groups of data will be created to allow for more targeted analysis.

Utilities facing regulatory constraints are excited by the opportunity to have an automated means of ensuring data privacy. As a sign of growing interest in the area, the utility non-profit EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) is also facilitating a working group to test new solutions to the regulator dilemma.

VIA Invited to Speak on Woodside Capital Partners Smart Sensors Panel Session

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VIA’s Colin Gounden has been invited to speak on a virtual panel on August 19th hosted by Woodside Capital Partners. The webinar titled, “Smart Sensors and their role in the Digitalization of Energy and Industry” is the first of a three-part series. The panelists will share “their perspectives and insights on the role that Smart Sensors have on the Digitalization of Energy and Industry”.

Hawaiian Electric Extends Commitment to GDAC™: Substation Transformers

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VIA and Hawaiian Electric are pleased to share that Hawaiian Electric has extended its commitment to the Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™): Substation Transformers. By extending and expanding its commitment to GDAC™, Hawaiian Electric hopes to further improve decision making and regulatory support related to its transformer fleet. In its second year, Hawaiian Electric plans to use GDAC™ to more effectively assess the current and predicted health of its transformers to better plan and prioritize proactive replacements, strengthen spares assessment and contingency planning, and identify opportunities to further enhance its substation transformer preventive maintenance.

Hawaiian Electric recognized that GDAC™, from its founding, has the potential to develop new insights and enhance its current predictive capabilities by using advanced data science and analytics to learn from Hawaiian Electric’s and partner utilities’ historical transformer condition and failure data. Since then, in 2019, Hawaiian Electric helped increase GDAC™ membership by including its Maui County and Hawaiʻi Island operating areas, to expand analysis from more than 300 substation transformers on Oʻahu to 500-plus across Maui, Lānaʻi, Molokaʻi, and Hawaiʻi Island.

“Hawaiian Electric has in the past performed various types of predictive analytics to forecast annual failures, determine adequate spares inventory, and estimate expected remaining life for our substation transformers. We joined GDAC™ to enhance our capabilities by learning from other members and learning more about the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Rick Pinkerton, Hawaiian Electric director of asset planning & strategy.

“We’re thrilled that Hawaiian Electric has extended its GDAC™ membership. At the end of last year, Hawaiian Electric was named “Utility of the Year” by Utility Dive for being a trailblazer in the industry and for its commitment to 100% clean energy by 2045 or earlier. Having the support of such an innovative and driven company can only help lead the entire utility industry to a more data-driven future,” said Kristen Merrill, VIA’s Vice President, Client Delivery.

Hawaiian Electric is supporting the recruitment of other members to join GDAC™: Substation Transformers to bolster predictive capabilities, gain more insights about their fleet, and to share practices and expertise.

About VIA

VIA helps governments, regulators, and power companies deliver $200Bn in energy every year to more than 100 million customers. VIA’s privacy-preserving analytics software, Trusted Analytics Chain™ (TAC™) reduces the cost and improves the quality of service of electricity transmission and distribution using AI and blockchain technologies. TAC™ (patents pending) is the bridge that securely connects power company data, distributed across many locations, to potential AI solutions. VIA established the Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™), built on top of TAC™, to allow multiple companies to securely pool data for more accurate analytics. Headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, VIA has received an InnovateMass grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and has been featured in Wired and Inc. Magazine for its leadership in technology innovation. For more information, please visit www.solvewithvia.com.

About Hawaiian Electric

Hawaiian Electric serves 95 percent of Hawaiʻi’s 1.4 million residents on the islands of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi Island, Maui, Lānaʻi and Molokaʻi, and has a goal of 100 percent renewables by 2045.

VIA Wins Swiss National Energy Project

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VIA, a leader in providing energy analytics while maintaining data privacy and security, has been awarded funding from the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) for a project called KnowlEDGE. The joint proposal with Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU), Romande Energie SA, and a major smart meter manufacturer, was the top ranked amongst submissions that were selected from a lengthy and highly competitive judging process.

“We are proud to have been selected as the top submission by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy. Together with HSLU and Romande Energie, we will enhance VIA’s Trusted Analytics Chain™ (TAC™) capabilities to run AI algorithms directly on smart meters, also known as edge computing,” said Jeremy Taylor, VIA’s Chief Scientific Officer.

The project will be delivered in Switzerland and led by HSLU. Ben Bowler, from HSLU, said, “this project is an exciting opportunity to bring together leading technology and advanced data science in a way that will benefit utilities and clean energy adoption both within Switzerland and globally.” 

Through the support of SFOE’s program, the collaborative will develop edge computing capabilities on smart meters. This will enable increased data privacy since data from individual meters will not be centralized.

The project will also increase temporal resolution of data, meaning more data can be analyzed more frequently. Traditional methods only allowed for 15, 30, or 60-minute intervals of smart meter data analysis due to the size of data and privacy concerns. With edge computing, this data can be analyzed every minute. This will allow real-time feedback to consumers on their energy usage and better preventative maintenance (e.g., upgrades to transformers because EVs are readily detected).

About VIA

VIA helps governments, regulators, and power companies deliver $200Bn in energy every year to more than 100 million customers. VIA’s privacy-preserving analytics software, Trusted Analytics Chain™ (TAC™) reduces the cost and improves the quality of service of electricity transmission and distribution using AI and blockchain technologies. TAC™ (patents pending) is the bridge that securely connects power company data, distributed across many locations, to potential AI solutions. VIA established the Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™), built on top of TAC™, to allow multiple companies to securely pool data for more accurate analytics. Headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, VIA has received an InnovateMass grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center and has been featured in Wired and Inc. Magazine for its leadership in technology innovation. For more information, please visit www.solvewithvia.com.

VIA Listed Among 32 Technology Startups Redefining Energy by StartUS Insights

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VIA is proud to be recognized by StartUS Insights as one of 32 companies out of nearly 10,000 surveyed that are changing the energy landscape.

According to StartUS Insights:

“We analyzed 9.926 energy technology startups and emerging companies working on solutions for the energy sector that are highly relevant for accelerating the progress of the seventh SDG of ‘Clean & Affordable Energy For All’.”

For the full article including visuals and overviews of other companies, visit the StartUS Insights website.

 

VIA Interviewed for Carbotnic Podcast

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James McWalter of Carbotnic, a podcast that covers cleantech founders and investors, interviewed VIA’s CEO, Colin Gounden for a podcast titled, “Energy and Data Silos”.

In the podcast, Colin answers questions about how VIA solves problems for utilities, data issues that hamper machine learning, VIA’s 30-Minute Pilot process, how COVID-19 has actually increased efficiencies of VIA’s teamwork, and more on company culture and recruiting.

To listen to the podcast, visit the Carbotnic website or click the play button below!

Introducing SWEET: AI for Data Wrangling

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For the third installment of our blog series, Let’s TAC™ About It, we’d like to introduce you to SWEET, a built-in function on VIA’s TAC™ platform. So, are you ready to TAC™ about it?

SWEET stands for Smart Wrangling Engine for Extraction and Transformation. Check out the video (or the transcription that follows) to learn how we use AI to wrangle data!

Below is a transcription of the “Introduction to SWEET: AI for Data Wrangling” video.

Analysts need to transfer data from a spreadsheet to a database, often known as data wrangling. The analyst usually identifies a rule or multiple rules (such as: column x is data, row 5 is a header and can be discarded, and so on). The analyst then writes code to execute that rule. This works well when rules are easily identifiable. In most cases, however, this is incredibly time consuming.

Data scientists spend more time wrangling and cleaning data than on analysis and AI. The problem with that is analytics insights are of the highest value, but get the least amount of resources. The big leap in AI is being able to process information without humans writing all the rules.

As an example, computer vision is used to identify a dog. Think of all the varieties of dogs and all the possible variations in context that those dogs could be in. There isn’t an army of people large enough to write rules to identify a random dog in a random photo.

And yet, AI can.

VIA’s approach to data wrangling is to use some of the exact same AI algorithms used in image recognition. This works across a much wider variety of contexts and spreadsheet or file formats. Let’s take a look at how SWEET works.

Here’s a spreadsheet. What SWEET is going to do is use a number of different machine learning algorithms to automate the process of getting the information into a database format.

The first model uses machine vision to map out the spreadsheet. Purple represents blank space, green is headings, yellow is actual data. Once that model has run, there’s a second algorithm that takes a look at the content.

The second algorithm skips over the purple. It looks at the green (which is the headers) to know which column to write where in the database. Finally, it would take a look at the yellow area to write the data to the database.

A third machine learning algorithm determines which column is derived from other parts of the sheet. For example, a total column is just the sum of the other columns and may not be necessary to write to the database. The third model separates these derived columns from the raw data.

In this example, the ACCOUNT column turns out to be the total of the other columns added up. It could be difficult for a human to understand immediately, but one of our models does this instantly.

SWEET’s approach works irrespective of the format. The model doesn’t have to be re-trained when it comes across spreadsheets that are new or in different formats.

So, what’s new and different here? AI algorithms have been evolving quickly. Many of the models that we implemented didn’t exist just a few years ago.

The other insight is that we broke the “convert this spreadsheet into a db” problem into multiple steps and have a different AI algorithm for each step.

Combined, SWEET, a built-in function in VIA’s TAC™ ingestion engine, helps make processes that used to take analysts days to do manually and makes them instantaneous.

Update: July 31, 2020

The image below shows the steps SWEET takes to transform raw files into a standard format.

VIA Wins $1.5M U.S. Air Force Contract

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VIA, a leader in providing energy analytics while maintaining data privacy and security, is pleased to share that the company has been awarded a $1.5M contract with the U.S. Air Force to provide secure and privacy-protected analysis of data. Under the contract, VIA’s Trusted Analytics Chain (TAC™) software platform will reduce the cost and increase the security and privacy of artificial intelligence and other data analysis.

TAC™ works by reversing the traditional relationship between analyst and data. Instead of transmitting a copy of sensitive data to an analyst, TAC™ brings an analyst’s algorithms in a controlled and auditable way to where data is located, runs analysis there, and returns only authorized answers back to the analyst. The underlying data is never revealed.

TAC™ also uses AI to wrangle and harmonize data to reduce data transformation costs. At a U.S. Air Force air base, the TAC™ Ingestion Engine (TIE) will be used to preprocess data. An audit trail will be created for all preprocessing steps including AI-enabled data wrangling, AI-enabled filtering of files for personally identifiable information (PII), and harmonizing of data from multiple sources.

Follow along on the VIA latest page for more information on current projects.

Meet the Team: Ashley DaSilva, Team Leader, Product Development

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Through a Q&A-style interview, you will hear from VIA team members about things like a typical day at the office and favorite foods.

What does a typical day at VIA look like for you?

Typically I start my morning with coffee and code review. At VIA, we have a strong culture of peer review to help us learn from each other and improve our work. Reviewing my colleagues’ code is a good way to see all the amazing work my colleagues are doing, and setting aside this time makes sure I provide them timely feedback.

Once I’ve finished my coffee, I like to take a morning walk (before we moved to remote work due to COVID-19, this was the time I spent commuting to the office.) The rest of the day varies depending on the project I’m working on: it could be writing a software design proposal for a new feature, wrangling data, or automating deployments.

I spend a lot of my day working with my colleagues to solve technical challenges. Often this is pair programming, but sometimes it’s designing the solution together on a (virtual) whiteboard. I really like having the opportunity to work on such a variety of tasks.

What’s something you have worked on at VIA that you are most proud of?

I was the technical lead on VIA’s 30-Minute Pilot and am really proud of how much of a difference it has made for our partners. They were able to get valuable data analysis in less than 30 minutes, while learning about VIA’s privacy-protecting software.

What’s your favorite VIA memory?

At our last company-wide All Hands event, we did a scavenger hunt in the underground city of Montreal. It really fit VIA’s culture: we were split into teams, and each team had to collaborate to solve the puzzles and at the same time, we were competing to solve more puzzles than the other teams! I got to know a little more about Montreal, and got to collaborate with colleagues that I don’t work with day-to-day.

If you were given an extra hour in your day, what would you spend it doing?

That’s a tough one. I would probably practice painting. I love creating things, and that passion is not limited to software. I love the bright colors and rich textures of oil paints, and the challenge of exercising my creativity in a totally different way than I do at work.

What’s your go-to food?

Tacos! Since moving to Montreal, I have learned how to make corn tortillas from scratch, which is actually much easier than I thought it would be.

What’s something everyone may not, but should know about working at VIA?

VIA’s twice yearly All Hands events are held in an “unconference” style: all team members submit and vote on topics just a couple days ahead of time. Because everyone has input into the topics, and the fact that there’s not much time for session leaders to prepare a lot of talking points, the sessions focus on discussion, collaboration, and brainstorming.

VIA Moves Technology Team from Griffintown to Purpose-Built Center in Downtown Montreal

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VIA, a leader in providing energy analytics while maintaining data privacy and security, is pleased to share that the company is moving its technology center from Griffintown to downtown Montreal. The move follows several months of scouting locations and gathering team needs and “wishlists”.

“In the last twelve months, VIA has grown five-fold and is set to double again this year. With this period of explosive growth, we needed a new location that met the needs of both our current and future team,” said Emma Fechney, VIA’s Head of People and Operations.

She continued, “We are excited to be part of the thriving AI network in Montreal. We aspire to make our space not only better suited to our growth but appealing to the academic and technical community by creating dedicated space for hosting future events and meetups. We made a decision to take an entire floor. This provides us increased room to accommodate both social distancing and growth.”

Key features of the new space includes four mother’s rooms, shower facilities, a non-binary bathroom, private access to our own floor, car parking, and space for bike storage. The new office is located just across the street from McGill University’s campus, has an exceptional view of Mont Royal, and is highly accessible by public transportation. McGill metro station is just a two-minute walk away.

Construction and personalization of the office space is currently underway. VIA is planning to allow optional attendance to the new office space beginning August 15th.

About VIA

VIA helps governments, regulators, and power companies deliver $200Bn in energy every year to more than 100 million customers. VIA’s privacy-preserving analytics software, Trusted Analytics Chain™ (TAC™) reduces the cost and improves the quality of service of electricity transmission and distribution using AI and blockchain technologies. TAC™ (patents pending) is the bridge that securely connects power company data, distributed across many locations, to potential AI solutions. VIA established the Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™), built on top of TAC™, to allow multiple companies to securely pool data for more accurate analytics. Headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, VIA has been featured in Wired and Inc. Magazine for its leadership in technology innovation. For more information, please visit www.solvewithvia.com.

TAC™ Platform to be Utilized for Energy Data Hackdays 2020 Event in Switzerland

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VIA’s Trusted Analytics Chain™ (TAC™) will be utilized for its privacy-protection capabilities by a competing team during Energy Data Hackdays 2020. The event will take place on August 28-29 in Brugg, Switzerland. The event is focused on Swiss energy data analysis and is considered one of the most important energy events in the Swiss energy industry in 2020. For more on the event and planned challenges, visit the following website: https://opendata.ch/projects/energy-data-hackdays-2020/.

Westly Group Invites VIA to Present During Virtual Demo Day

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The Westly Group, a key investor in VIA, has invited CEO Colin Gounden to present during their virtual demo day on July 30th. Colin will present an overview of VIA and progress to date to a group of 100 investors and senior energy executives.

VIA Hosts First Installment of GDAC™ Virtual Mini-Series

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Last week, VIA was proud to host the first session of its GDAC™ Virtual Mini-Series. The event was invite-only and had over 20 participants including members from founding utilities, Hawaiian Electric and Vector. 

VIA advisor and former ABB executive, Andrew Bright gave a keynote presentation on two topics: physical resiliency trends for power transformers and trends in sensors. 

In addition to Andrew’s keynote, VIA presented “GDAC™ By The Numbers” (click image below) that covered quick stats on data, equipment, portal enhancements, and more for members.

Given the success of this first event, VIA hopes to continue the series and open it up to external participants to allow for a better understanding of GDAC™’s value. If you are interested in learning more about GDAC™, please email gdac@solvewithvia.com.

Let’s TAC™ About It: Models for Private Data Service

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For the second installment of our blog series, we will cover VIA’s Models for Private Data (MPD) service. So, are you ready to TAC™ about it?

Companies are awash with data. To make sense of the growing data volume, AI models continue to proliferate in number and improve in performance. Even better, many of the best models are open sourced. Leading companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others have made freely available AI models for everything from facial recognition to text analysis. 

So, why aren’t more companies taking advantage of these models for analysis of their corporate data?

One of the top challenges is data privacy. Many companies are fearful of sending their data to the cloud or to an external AI provider. Data and AI regulations from Europe (GDPR) to California (CCPA) are complex to navigate. Even without government oversight, companies worry about the reputational cost of a real or perceived privacy violation. 

VIA’s TAC™ platform solves this with its Models for Private Data (MPD) service. 

TAC™’s MPD service makes machine learning models available for download and easy incorporation into data science workflows. This has the dual benefit of eliminating the need to send data outside the organization or to the cloud and also the need to have internal AI experts to run state of the art machine learning models. The result is that data is kept private and secure.

As an example, imagine a company capturing images about their equipment to identify corrosion. Through TAC™’s MPD service, a data scientist can choose a corrosion analysis model (e.g., a pre-trained TensorFlow algorithm) and easily incorporate that model into their workflow. The MPD service accomplishes this by using containers to make the models easily accessible through their Python scripts. The models use input from their local databases and return a list of predictions locally. Data remains on premise in their local VPC at all times. This is one way that we keep data private across our Global Data Asset Collaborative™ (GDAC™) with multiple energy utilities.

Stay tuned for a video demo of this service in the coming weeks!

VIA’s TAC™ Simultaneously Runs on Multiple Cloud Platforms

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VIA is pleased to announce the first two customer implementations of its TAC™ platform on multiple cloud infrastructures including AWS, AWS GovCloud (US), and Azure and mixed cloud environments (e.g., DVM on Azure and TAC™ nodes on AWS). 

“In order to serve VIA’s growing customer base, we have to interoperate with all major cloud provider platforms including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. For companies to benefit from pooling their data together (like our GDAC™ program does), we need to be able to support the cloud platforms where their data is located,” said Jeremy Taylor, VIA’s Chief Scientific Officer.

“Unlike other platforms, TAC™ brings analysts’ queries to the data. This means that analysis needs to be run wherever the customer has their data which could include any of the major cloud providers or even on premise. TAC™’s capability to run on both AWS and Azure expands the number of datasets available to train and test AI models,” explained Ashley DaSilva, VIA’s Team Leader, Product Development. 

For continued developments on VIA’s TAC™ platform, be sure to see the latest on our website.