  Non-intrusive presence detection of individuals in commercial buildings is
much easier to implement than intrusive methods such as passive infrared,
acoustic sensors, and camera. Individual power consumption, while providing
useful feedback and motivation for energy saving, can be used as a valuable
source for presence detection. We conduct pilot experiments in an office
setting to collect individual presence data by ultrasonic sensors, acceleration
sensors, and WiFi access points, in addition to the individual power monitoring
data. PresenceSense (PS), a semi-supervised learning algorithm based on power
measurement that trains itself with only unlabeled data, is proposed, analyzed
and evaluated in the study. Without any labeling efforts, which are usually
tedious and time consuming, PresenceSense outperforms popular models whose
parameters are optimized over a large training set. The results are interpreted
and potential applications of PresenceSense on other data sources are
discussed. The significance of this study attaches to space security, occupancy
behavior modeling, and energy saving of plug loads.
