Blog 1 - 'NMES Coffee Morning' Presentation
Musa, 10 April 2023
On 22 February 2023, I had the opportunity to present my research to other PhD students of the NMES (Natural, Mathematical and Engineering Sciences) faculty at King’s College London. The event, fondly called ‘NMES Coffee Mornings’, is meant to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the faculty.
I was the second presenter at the Coffee Morning, and this was my first experience presenting to an audience outside my research group. I went in early but opted to be the second speaker because I wanted to see the format of the presentation from a more senior PhD student. The title of my presentation was: Electric Vehicle Charging Forecast Using Machine Learning.
I began my presentation by narrating a story about the picture of the first Electric Vehicle charging facility in my hometown. I then went on to briefly explain the title of my research which is ‘Electric Vehicle Charging Forecast using Machine Learning.’ I then gave a general overview about my presentation which bordered on literature review, research questions and my immediate research plans.
I showed the title of some of the important papers I have reviewed thus far. The first paper is a review paper which gives an overview of what research says about EV forecasting. The second paper is about EV charging infrastructure and the last paper was about autonomous electric vehicles. I then showed them a data link of electric vehicle charging load sessions from the London borough of Barnet.
I then presented three research questions and pegged each question to an objective that defines a deliverable which is the potential findings of the research:
Question 1: What does current research say about EV charging forecast?
Question 2: How to remedy the unavailability of data in planning for EV charging infrastructure?
Question 3: How does conventional EV charging compare with autonomous EV charging?
After about 10 to 15 minutes of presenting my research and explaining the current phase which I am still working on ( i.e., literature review), I received some questions from the audience related to whether I will use optimisation algorithms in my research or not. I answered that I might use some optimisation techniques and algorithms, but as of now that is not something I am looking into because I am yet to settle on a defined and narrowed set of goals, objectives and questions. I am more concerned with machine learning applications to the problems and questions I aim to work on.
I also received a suggestion from one of the listeners and a fellow PhD Candidate working on Control Systems, i.e that I should narrow my topic. This will allow me to identify gaps and define a research question. I gladly accepted and took note of the suggestions made.
I look forward to attending such events which will help me improve my presentation and communication skills in an academic setting and receive feedback from the audience. More generally, I am also looking forward to presenting outside my faculty by disseminating my research findings to the engineering audience at conferences.
I am still working hard to narrow down my literature search, identify gaps, formulate a problem, and run simulations to come up with some meaningful results worth sending to a conference. The aim is to extend these experiences into journal papers.
Contact: zulkiflu.musa_sarkin_adar@kcl.ac.uk