Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)

Online civic engagement platforms accessed via desktops or mobile devices can provide new opportunities for the public to express views and insights, consider the views of others, assist in identifying innovative ideas and new approaches to public policy issues, and directly engage with elected leaders. Existing platforms vary widely in their approaches to: assessment, engagement, ideation, evaluation, and deliberation. We consider three online platforms: the Living Voters Guide, including its earlier iterations Consider.it and Reflect; the Open Town Hall; and the California Report Card. We compare them using the International Association of Public Participation’s “Spectrum of Public Participation” framework. Using a 10-point scale, we evaluate the user interface of each platform in terms of how well it supports the Spectrum’s levels of civic engagement (inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and empower). Results suggest how user interface design affects civic engagement and suggest opportunities for future work

This report explores the overall potential of blockchain’s use in the public sector and focuses on two use cases that have received less attention: blockchain-based digital identity and health records management systems for the homeless and other vulnerable populations in California.

Modern society relies heavily upon complex and widespread electric grids. In recent years, advanced sensors, intelligent automation, communication networks, and information technologies (IT) have been integrated into the electric grid to enhance its performance and efficiency. Integrating these new technologies has resulted in more interconnections and interdependencies between the physical and cyber components of the grid. Natural disasters and man-made perturbations have begun to threaten grid integrity more often. Urban infrastructure networks are highly reliant on the electric grid and consequently, the vulnerability of infrastructure networks to electric grid outages is becoming a major global concern. In order to minimize the economic, social, and political impacts of large-scale power system outages, the grid must be resilient in addition of being robust and reliable. The concept of a power system’s cyber-physical resilience centers around maintaining critical functionality of the system backbone in the presence of unexpected extreme disturbances. Resilience is a multidimensional property of the electric grid; it requires managing disturbances originating from physical component failures, cyber component malfunctions, and human attacks. In the electric grid community, there is not a clear and universally accepted definition of cyber-physical resilience. This paper focuses on the definition of resilience for the electric grid and reviews key concepts related to system resilience. This paper aims to advance the field not only by adding cyber-physical resilience concepts to power systems vocabulary, but also by proposing a new way of thinking about grid operation with unexpected extreme disturbances and hazards and leveraging distributed energy resources. The concepts of service availability and quality are not new, but many recognize the need of resilience in maintaining essential services to critical loads, for example to allow home refrigerators to operate for food conservation in the aftermath of a hurricane landfall. By providing a comprehensive definition of power system resilience, this paper paves the way for creating appropriate and effective resilience standards and metrics.

We report on an experimental case study of personalized lighting controls built on top of an infrastructure designed to enable rapid development of applications in commercial buildings. Our personalized lighting controls (PLC) use an existing standard commercial building lighting automation system and require no new hardware to deploy. PLC presents occupants with a "shared virtual light switch" accessible online and easily viewable on smart phones by scanning a QR code. It embodies three important design principles: individual empowerment with localized human-centered resolution, token effort for energy consumption and return to a low-power state when inactive. After deploying our lighting controls on two new floors of a large research building on campus, we show a sustainable reduction in lighting energy of 50% to 70% on both floors over 12 weeks, continuing to this day. These savings are found to come from a combination of reducing brightness and keeping lights on less often, especially during evenings and weekends.

In this work we address the problem of static state estimation (SE) in distribution grids by leveraging historical meter data (pseudo-measurements) with real-time measurements from synchrophasors (PMU data). We present a Bayesian linear estimator based on a linear approximation of the power flow equations for distribution networks, which is computationally more efficient than standard nonlinear weighted least squares (WLS) estimators. We show via numerical simulations that the proposed strategy performs similarly to the standard WLS estimator on a small distribution network. A key advantage of the proposed approach is that it provides explicit off-line computation of the estimation error confidence intervals, which we use to explore the tradeoffs between number of PMUs, PMU placement and measurement uncertainty. Since the estimation error in distribution systems tends to be dominated by uncertainty in loads and scarcity of instrumented nodes, the linearized method along with the use of high-precision PMUs may be a suitable way to facilitate on-line state estimation where it was previously impractical.