Nigel Goddard Honorary Professor and member of Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation School of Informatics University of Edinburgh

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School of Informatics University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum 10 Crichton Street Edinburgh EH8 9AB United Kingdom

Email: Publications University of Edinburgh Summary Page

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Research Interests - Sustain Lab

Although now retired, I am still interested in computational modelling of systems related to sustainability. I define sustainability as the continued functioning of the various systems relied upon for human civilisation. These include of course many earth systems, but also social and political systems, and many human-created technological systems. Sustainability is compatible with change, but not with collapse. I am most interested in helping students at all levels to engage in this kind of computational modelling work, whether for course projects, dissertation projects or plain interest, and in collaborating with staff both at Edinburgh and other institutions in research in this area.

Energy@Edinburgh interview

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Previous Projects

• Peoplehood
• Dispatch
• Smart Energy Research Lab
• Feather
• IDEAL: Intelligent Domestic Energy Advice Loop. Reducing energy demand from existing dwellings through occupant behaviour change is crucial for meeting UK carbon emission reduction targets and will help the increasing numbers of households struggling to pay their energy bills. This project explores the interaction of energy technologies and householder behaviours related to energy in a sample of 255 dwellings. Using wireless sensing, machine learning, and natural language generation technologies, we will construct an intelligent advice loop that will provide information to householders on what activities they are engaging in which use energy and how much energy is used for each one, together with suggestions for what they might do to reduce their energy expenditure; for example: "Last week you spent £10 on hot water for showers, if you reduced your average shower time from 15 minutes to 12 minutes you could save £100 per year". down. I was Principal Investigator on this project and had most interest in the machine learning methods we applied to infer behavours from noisy sensor data. I also oversaw the software engineering aspects of the data pipeline and the feedback channels.
• BIG-SMALL This project studied the extent to which national surveys of energy use in homes can be carried out remotely and largely automatically using smart meter data augmented with carefully targeted additional sensor data. It was a spin-off from the IDEAL project, and was a collaboration with UCL's Centre for Energy Epidemiology.
• Enhance. Enhance was a research project which took a Living Lab approach to understanding and reducing energy demand in public sector buildings. The project was a collaboration between the School of Informatics, School of Social and Political Science, and Edinburgh College of Art at the University of Edinburgh. I was Principle Investigator.
• 7see macroeconomic model This project, led by Simon Roberts at Arup, was a multidisciplinary collaboration aimed at understanding the long-term drivers and constraints on evolution of the macroeconomy, in the tradition of biophysical economics. We used system dynamics modelling methods together with extensive analysis of national macroeconomic data to enable evaluation of policy options related to natural resources (principally energy). Two versions of the UK model have been released (here and here) . The fundamental theses of this work is that, in contrast to standard macroeconomic models:
  1. There are serious constraints on substitutability in the short and medium term. An obvious example is the forty-year commitment to energy sources.
  2. The system does not tend to an equilibrium but is a complex chaotic system that nevertheless in the right circumstances exhibits stability and strong patterns (think of weather and climate).
  3. Energy is a fundamental enabler of economic activity, and in a time of uncertain energy supplies can act as a significant constraint on economic activity.

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Ph.D. training

I am no longer supervising Ph.D. students, but am interested in co-advising students who are engaging in computational modelling of systems related to sustainability.

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Other Activities

I was a member of the EU Smart Cities Initiative Stakeholder Platform, in the Energy Efficiency and Buildings Working Group. Within this group, I was Topic Coordinator for the "Living Labs and the Smart City" topic. We developed a set of proposals for the European Commission to advise them on key innovations to focus on over the period to 2020.

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Teaching

• Modelling of Systems for Sustainability This course is for students in their final or next to final year is designed to introduce them to computational modelling of systems needed for sustainability. It ran in 2023/24 and 2024/25, but is not running in 2025/26. I hope it will be reinstated and will in that case contribute to its teaching.

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Entrepreneurship

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Mastodon