Jayant Taneja

Current Research
I develop sensing and analytical systems to improve the planning and operations of societal-scale infrastructure, primarily in developing regions. My team possesses skills spanning Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Economics. A major theme of our work is to combine disparate datasets – from sensors, satellites, and surveys – and modern computing methods to measure and improve the performance of infrastructure. I lead a five-university effort called e-GUIDE focusing on measuring and unlocking demand for electricity in sub-Saharan Africa, while also producing a generation of African leaders in computing and engineering research on electricity. We have built deep partnerships with utility and off-grid electricity providers in nine African countries. 

My team’s research centers on two areas: (1) infrastructure analysis and improvement and (2) future demand for electricity in sub-Saharan Africa. On infrastructure analysis, my team has developed and deployed custom IoT devices to accurately measure electricity reliability in a variety of developing regions and employed these outage measurements as training data to develop a technique to estimate grid reliability using only nightly illumination data from satellites; we are currently scaling this method to produce a decade of fine-grained electricity reliability estimates (at 0.5 km2) for the 300 largest African cities. This dataset will provide unprecedented insight on the reliability of electricity supplies in Africa to governments, utilities, investors, and businesses. We are also developing new camera-based methods to measure grid power quality that exploit the flicker of light bulbs, aiding utilities and regulators to improve service by surfacing unseen power quality issues that hinder electrification and ultimately decarbonization. On future energy systems, my team has analyzed longitudinal electricity consumption in Kenya to illuminate how customer growth patterns have evolved, and developed a DNN-based method using satellite imagery to predict future electricity use for the 12mn structures in Kenya, with the aim to transfer this model to similar countries. We also focus on demand stimulation in specific sectors, collaborating with utilities and governments on the implications of EV adoption on electricity grids in urban Africa, the impacts of electric conversion of fishing boat diesel outboard motors in Lake Victoria, and identifying areas of Ethiopia with diesel irrigation pumps using a new technique leveraging vegetation and pollution satellite data to guide electrification. We are exploring new work targeted at enabling widespread electric cooking and novel uses of energy storage in Africa. Additionally, in the US, we are developing a technique to identify sanitation system type for each of the 150mn properties in the US using a variety of geospatial, environmental, and imagery datasets.

Learn more at Taneja Research Group

Academic Background

Research Scientist, IBM Research - Africa, 2013-2016 
PhD Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley - 2013 
MS Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley - 2007 
BS Electrical and Computer Engineering, The Ohio State University - 2005