Stephen Lee
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Computer Science
Energy use has real costs for households and the climate. Many families spend a large share of income on home energy bills, and the growth of computing is driving up electricity use and carbon emissions.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
- Topics
home energy efficiency
energy burden
micro-retrofits
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Sep 2027
What they work on
- Test whether inexpensive off-the-shelf sensors placed by residents can pinpoint where a specific home loses energy, without professional audit equipment.
- Design a self-directed home energy audit platform that uses behavioral science and community input from Pittsburgh residents to recommend matched, low-cost micro-retrofits people will follow through on.
- Develop lifetime management and emission-aware policies within container orchestration platforms so distributed computing systems run at safe levels, extend hardware lifespan and reduce embodied emissions.
- Create techniques that jointly reduce energy use and embodied carbon emissions by exploiting spatial and temporal variation in grid emissions and computing workload.
More about the research
Two projects tackle both problems with data-driven systems. One helps residents find cheap energy fixes in their own homes. The other designs computing infrastructure that cuts emissions across the full life of its hardware.
Why it matters
Low-income households that struggle with energy bills could use a do-it-yourself platform and cheap sensors to find affordable fixes that lower monthly costs, without major renovations. Operators of data centers and other computing infrastructure could use lifespan-aware scheduling to cut both electricity-related and hardware manufacturing emissions. Extending hardware life this way could support the move toward carbon-free computing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Andre Bauer
Illinois Institute of Technology, IL·Computer Science
Develop the Cosimo co-simulation framework, coupling existing simulators with live orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes to model autoscaling, load balancing and failure recovery.
Emma Strubell
Carnegie Mellon University, PA·Computer Science
Develop transparent and accurate carbon accounting for computing, including standardized protocols for measuring and reporting emissions and methods to reconcile inconsistent estimates and broad error margins across hardware lifecycles.
Kaiwen Chen
University of Alabama, AL·Engineering
Enable real-time autonomous drone navigation around homes for thermal-imaging energy audits, studying embodied AI, edge/cloud computing and human-robot interaction methods.
The school
University of Pittsburgh: 83 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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