Originally published in EEMCS (TU Delft) magazine: Maxwell.
Being associated to more than one department, life after masters has been well… filled with multiple opportunities, but challenging and yet rewarding in every way possible. So before I dwell deeper into the opportunities, challenges and the rewards, a brief about my life before and during EWI: I graduated in 2018 from TU Delft with masters in Data Science (Computer Science) from EWI and masters in Policy Analysis (EPA) from TPM. Before my masters, I did my bachelors in engineering in India. Growing up in India, I have seen how lack of basic facilities like electricity or clean water hampered the development of rural and urban slum localities. This motivated me to start a project on rural development near a village during my bachelors in Mumbai, and engage many engineering students to develop technical solutions for these basic issues e.g. access to clean water, better livelihood options, etc. However, during implementation of these amazingly innovative technical solutions, we realized that implementation in rural or not-so-developed region remained a challenge because of the lack of coherence of policies, people/industries and technology. Thus, I decided to pursue masters in EPA or Engineering and Policy Analysis at TU Delft, which is a very unique program tailoring the policy development for industries with multiple stakeholder clashes. During this program, I realized that policy analysis meant a lot of data-driven modelling. This opened up the whole world of better data models i.e. data-science, for me. For example, I could use them right from Machine Learning and Neural Networks for understanding patterns in census data, to Agent Based and Artificial Intelligence models for understanding the reasons (motivations) of behaviors of different actors in a given environment/ system setting. Thus, I finally took up the master thesis, which entailed my work in two universities (ETH Zurich) and under main supervision of two departments (TPM and EWI at TU Delft). My project was on finding solutions for the major socio-economic and technical barriers in implementation of peer-to-peer electricity trading platforms for rural electrification in India [1]. The theses ended up being awarded the best graduate of TU Delft, so all-in-all life until EWI ended quite okay after relentless working weekends and nights.
The opportunities after graduation
But what happened to all this after my masters? I will first tell you about the bright side of the picture – I got multiple opportunities to continue my work, improve my skillsets and meet many amazing people in the similar sector. The first biggest opportunity, which came up, was with idea of Energy Bazaar [2]. Combining master thesis project of Dirk van den Biggelar (System Controls, 3ME), Yvo Hunink (Sustainable Energy Technology, EWI), and two of my theses, we came up with the idea of working on a startup, Energy Bazaar. Energy Bazaar is a blockchain and AI based peer-to-peer energy-trading software platform, which allows trading of electricity from one solar rooftop with excess of energy to another house, which needs energy. Through our master projects, the idea originated and we created a basic simulation platform as proof-of-concept with developers from different part of the world in a blockchain hackathon. Also, through a hackathon at COP23 in Bonn (Climate Change Conference by UNFCCC), we developed another proof-of-concept to integrate this platform with hardware like communicating smart meters, with a multi-disciplinary team with blockchain, AI, hardware, marketing and frontend specialization.
The next opportunity which came to me personally, in the same time of development of Energy Bazaar, was a PhD opportunity at ETH Zurich. Due to my multidisciplinary experience in policy design, and data modeling from AI-ML to data management, I found a sweet position at Environmental Engineering lab of ETH Zurich. My ongoing PhD project is about developing AI and ML models to understand the consumption behaviors in urban residential buildings and to suggest policies to building owners (and Swiss economy) to combat their environmental footprints. This work has been extremely good learning experience for me until now, where I am being put out of my comfort zone every day. On a daily basis, the tasks can be anything or everything between - developing neural network models, understanding how the environmental emissions are calculated for an apple to an air travel, talking to building owners in German, developing schemas for terabytes of data in postgres, working with social scientists and economists, teaching a class or two, supervising a student, or just lying in the grass.
Facing various challenges
As much as all the above opportunities look like a rosy picture, here is the hard truth – it comes with many tough challenges. The first challenge I faced as the team of Energy bazaar was implementing the proof-of-concept solution to real world pilot. After multiple discussions, there were some successful partnerships established in India, but with passing time, they fell off, due to differences in research-industry motives. The implementation has been a challenge at a technical level as well due to the limitations of storage solution, lack of accessibility to reliable telecommunication networks in rural India and multiple infrastructural issues. Also, with all of us doing Energy Bazaar as a part time stint from three different countries, the responsibilities have been difficult to manage. However, having said this, the main challenge I think which remains is the “newness” of the blockchain technology and peer-to-peer energy regulation market. At both the technical and the policy front, Energy Bazaar is a very innovative challenge and opportunity to the current infrastructure and policies of not just India and developing counties, but also many developed countries. Many solutions in energy p2p market are coming up, but all of them remain a pilot, because of these incompatibility issues of old electricity market regulations and infrastructures.
Coming to the challenges as a PhD student, I can definitely say for many of my colleagues and friends doing a PhD, life of PhD student is hard – wait, what is life of PhD student? Haha, exactly – so at times, it can be extremely rewarding with you getting multiple results some fine sunny day, but at the same time, it can be extremely discouraging when you run the same model for months and it is still giving you stupid results. But the toughest challenge in my PhD has been the multidisciplinary nature of it. As much as I see it as an opportunity, I know it is a tough job of an integrator like me to merge fields of social science, economics and energy/ environmental engineering in one data model.
The rewarding experiences
Now obviously you are expecting me to finish this all on a good note – and yes, there is lot of good stuff or rewarding experiences to share. As much real and hard as it gets on a daily basis (because that is what we sign up for after doing a tough masters or bachelors), I truly enjoy this journey of my life after EWI. I learn so many things every day as a Energy Bazaar co-founder or a ETH Zurich PhD student. Right from management skills in entrepreneurship department to distributed computing in Computer Science department, I can take any course or put anything on real world implementation – which makes my learning go well in both breadth and depth. I get to meet many experts in different fields and get feedbacks for my work, right from policy makers in Vancouver in a ministerial conference, to experts in industrial ecology in international conference in Berlin (All in the same month!). I get to have a multicultural and highly innovative environment every day where I cannot just work in flexible hours and learn personality development skills to languages, but also do sports and spent time in beautiful Swiss nature. The biggest professional reward for me has been to develop the ability to be agile and adapt my work to the situations and environment. For example, we have been adapting the idea of Energy Bazaar to the urban developed parts of the world, especially in the building sector. For the sake of the pilot, it becomes easier to do under our direct supervision (bringing in more partnerships as well) here in Europe, and helps integrate my PhD learnings quite directly in the startup.
I would like to conclude with my small example of my own experience, that life after EWI can be extremely opportunistic and full of challenges, but yet extremely rewarding. So, keep doing what you are doing even if it gets a bit rough – life is definitely greener on the other side ;)