Thailand has targeted to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 when the power grid will need to accommodate 50% share of renewable electricity generation capacity; see [Ene21]. The most recent draft of Power Development Plan 2024 (PDP2024) for 2024 - 2037 from [Ene24] proposes to add a new solar generation capacity of approximately 24,400 MWp (more than 4 times the amount issued in the previous Alternative Energy Development Plan 2015-2036 (AEDP2015) at 6,000 MWp, shown in [Dep15, p.9]. This amount does not yet include behind-the-meter, self-generation solar installed capacities of the prosumers, which is expected to increase at an accelerating rate. Solar integration into the power grid with such a sharprising amount will pose technical challenges to the operation and control of the transmission and distribution networks, carried out by the transmission system operator (TSO) and distribution system operator (DSO), as presented in [OB16]. Hence, TSO in Thailand will need an effective means to estimate the solar power generation across the entire transmission network, on an hourly basis, or even finer time resolution, to provide economic hour-to-hour generation dispatch for load following the total net load of the transmission, and to prepare sufficient system flexibility (i.e., ramp-rate capability of the thermal and hydropower plants, or energy storage systems) to cope with the net load fluctuation due to solar generation intermittency for maintaining system frequency stability, concurrently, in its operation. For DSO, a significant amount of reverse power flow when self-generation from solar exceeds self-consumption can lead to technical concerns of voltage regulation and equipment overloading problems. The near real-time estimation of solar generation in each distribution area will enable DSO to activate proper network switching or reconfiguring to mitigate such fundamental concerns to ensure its reliable operation.

Air pollution is a major global environmental health threat, in particular for people who live or work near pollution sources. Areas adjacent to pollution sources often have high ambient pollution concentrations, and those areas are commonly referred to as air pollution hotspots. Detecting and characterizing pollution hotspots are of great importance for air quality management, but are challenging due to the high spatial and temporal variability of air pollutants. In this work, we explore the use of mobile sensing data (i.e., air quality sensors installed on vehicles) to detect pollution hotspots. One major challenge with mobile sensing data is uneven sampling, i.e., data collection can vary by both space and time. To address this challenge, we propose a two-step approach to detect hotspots from mobile sensing data, which includes local spike detection and sample-weighted clustering. Essentially, this approach tackles the uneven sampling issue by weighting samples based on their spatial frequency and temporal hit rate, so as to identify robust and persistent hotspots. To contextualize the hotspots and discover potential pollution source characteristics, we explore a variety of cross-domain urban data and extract features from them. As a soft-validation of the extracted features, we build hotspot inference models for cities with and without mobile sensing data. Evaluation results using real-world mobile sensing air quality data as well as cross-domain urban data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in detecting and inferring pollution hotspots. Furthermore, the empirical analysis of hotspots and source features yields useful insights regarding neighborhood pollution sources.

For Thailand, Dell's vision is consistent with the government's "Thailand 4.0" initiative which focuses on the digital transformation of the Thai economy and society. Under this initiative, the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) covering parts of Rayong, Chon Buri and Chachoengsao provinces is a showcase example of smart cities and a new generation of industries and services. In his keynote speech at the 2018 Dell Technologies/World event in Las Vegas on April 30, Dell said big data is the new "rocket fuel", and when it is leveraged with AI and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities on the next 5G communication platform the results will be unprecedented. He cited smart cities and autonomous cars as examples of how massive data running to the tune of, say, 200 petabytes per day from just one city, and its IoT devices plus self-driving vehicles, can be used to improve the way people live, commute and do other activities. According to Dell, all stakeholders and businesses should benefit from the new digital infrastructure required to deliver unprecedented results as the use of cloud-based computing and storage facilities will be combined with the so-called "edge" computing capability such as that of autonomous cars and other smart devices.