By Nate Jones

Staff Writer 

Joseph Conroy of South Portland isn’t a fortuneteller or a psychic, but for nearly 10 years he has made a living predicting the future. While the 43-year-old father of three wouldn’t know much about your astronomical horoscope, he could use his software program, Auto-Associative Adaptive Artificial Intelligence (A4-I) to predict the amount of emissions generated from your car or your house’s demand for electricity. 

Conroy said the program has been used to predict everything from earthquakes to barrier reef predator populations, and one day A4-I might even be able to predict global climate change.

“[A4-I] actually learns on its own, based on the number of variables and models you program it to contain,” he said. “You can use it almost for anything.”

While the computer program may sound like something from a science fiction movie, Conroy claims to be nothing more than “mathematically inclined.”

Conroy graduated from Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, where he studied to be a marine engineer. 

“I didn’t like working on ships,” he said. “I like the sailing aspect, but when you’re crammed inside working on an electrical panel it’s very different.”

After college, Conroy became an environmental engineering correspondent while attending courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), simultaneously beginning work on a Predictive Emissions Monitoring (PEM) system. The original PEM Conroy designed was programmed to predict and monitor possibly harmful gasses created on construction worksites, Conroy said. 

In 1997 Conroy became part of the dot-com revolution when he joined a company called Envatech, which began using the PEM to predict the amount of emissions produced in the smokestacks of various plants. The wireless “sniffers,” which could monitor up to 40 gases at a time, eliminated the need for factories to conduct manual emissions measurements, and saved U.S. industries $1.3 billion a year, Conroy said.

“In 1998 [PEM] was approved by the U.S. government to help set emission standards,” he said. 

In addition to predicting emissions, Conroy applied the PEM program to help paper-makers predict motor failures, resulting in reduced emissions and saved operating costs.

“I’m really an environmentalist at heart,” he said.

The PEM software would become the basis for Conroy’s A4-I program, despite Envatech going out of business in February 2001.

“My mind was going forward with what was the next complicated thing,” Conroy said.

Knowing little of power plants or power grids, Conroy wrote a letter to Steven Whitley, the senior vice president and chief operating officer of ISO New England, the organization managing the region’s electricity supply, proposing he be allowed to present his thoughts on how to improve the company’s operations.

“Without really knowing anything, I said ‘I’m going to help the power grid.’ I put together some papers and showed them how, mathematically, how I thought I could make the grid run better,” Conroy said.

Conroy and his previous Envatech team were allowed to “tweak” the grid using their predictive programs to anticipate power requirements so companies wouldn’t purchase contracts with power plants they wouldn’t actually need.

“You can’t store power,” Conroy said. “The farther into the future that you can predict your needs, the more efficiently you can operate.”

Conroy created A4-I by further developing the original PEM, and said he managed to save 440 megawatts of power an hour, enough electricity to run half a million homes for the same amount of time, and a $529 million savings for the industry, he said.

In April 2002, Conroy formed Envapower when, despite the plan to integrate A4-I within the New England power grid, a consolidation in administration by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission prevented Conroy’s predictive software from becoming part of normal grid operations.

Conroy said he and the rest of Envapower were devastated after refining their optimization program for more than a year, but were determined enough to find another use for A4-I.

“We turned it from an optimization procedure into a future commodities prediction company,” Conroy said. “Kind of like a price forecast for power grids.”

Rather than working with ISO New England, A4-I targeted the entire power industry in order to predict pricing for power managers across the country.

“[Central Maine Power] didn’t use it because they were too small, just to give you an idea of the size of the thing,” Conroy said.

Conroy said his A4-I program became so accurate at predicting the different elements of the power providing industry, it began to influence Wall Street investors, and eventually the entire stock market by successfully predicting unanticipated trends in other forecasts.

“There was a heat wave coming and we believed the demand for power was going to be greater than what the market was saying,” Conroy said. “We were right; Weather is a big part of it.”

 After several more instances where A4-I accurately predicted events contrary to the market anticipations, Conroy received a call from the Security Exchange Commission.

“They told me there were watching us very closely,” he said. “I told them my background was in mathematics and we were playing it straight. I didn’t realize how important we were becoming.”

After operating as an future commodities prediction service for five years, Envapower was sold to a Wall Street subsidiary company for 12.2 million in 2007.

“It’s a big company buyout,” Conroy said.

Conroy said he was surprised to learn MIT is in the process of considering granting him an honorary Ph.D.

“I’m always saying ‘I wish I had my Ph.D.,’ now I actually might,” he said.

Conroy is continuing to find new ways to apply the predictive qualities of A4-I with his new company, CostaConroy LLC, which applies the program to the stock market to offer advice to clients in their selling and purchasing of shares. 

Despite his continued success, Conroy said he has no desire to leave the South Portland area, and encourages other aspiring mathematicians, engineers and inventors to “dream big and follow through” as a pioneer in his field.