Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Joining EE at CCNY in Aug. '23, News

Joining the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at CCNY in Aug. ’23

May 2023

I am ecstatic to announce that on Aug. 1st I will be joining the Dept. of Electrical Engineering within the Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York (CCNY), as Assistant Professor. It is amazing to join an Institution with 175 years of history, founded as the first tuition-free college in the US (until 1976), and which still strives to provide wider access to higher education for all. Two units within CCNY have been named after notable alumni, who decisively redefined their course with their donations and leadership: the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership (after the first African American Sec. of State) and the Grove School of Engineering (after one of Intel’s founding members & CEO, Andrew Grove). At CCNY, I will establish the Digitalized Electric Grid Innovations, Developments & Applications Laboratory (DEgIDAL). DEgiDAL will focus on how data-sets of historical records and real-time synchronized measurements can inform renewable energy pricing, grid stability and protection, and equitable access to electricity of high power quality for all.

I am grateful to everyone at Carnegie Mellon University for 6 wonderful years as postdoc and special faculty, and for enabling me to take on important roles within the US energy space. My postdoc advisors Profs. Gabriela Hug and Soummya Kar trained me thoroughly in power system optimization. Prof. Jay Whitacre involved me in breakthrough research on battery storage planning. Profs. Jay Apt, Paul Salvador, Barry Rawn, Sevin Yeltekin and Willem van Hoeve inspired me and supported me in developing and teaching 5 courses, and in advising more than a dozen MSc students from the College of Engineering and the Tepper School of Business.

Undoubtedly, this immensely joyful milestone would have been impossible without the strong Electrical & Computer Engineering foundations I received at my alma mater, the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. In the form of gratitude I will refer specifically to two exquisite people that defined my path at NTUA. Firstly, my PhD+MSc advisor, the tireless and all-round power systems scholar Prof. Nikos Hatziargyriou, taught me most of what I know and was the ‘charge’ of my academic journey across the Atlantic. Secondly, Prof. Timos Sellis, a bright beacon of databases’ expertise, was the one who infused me with the passion for artificial intelligence and machine learning through data mining.

Lastly, I want to thank Drs. Giannis Bourmpakis, Kyri Baker, Constance Crozier, Jeff Wischkaemper, Mads Almassalkhi and Javad Mohammadi, and Profs. Fran Li, David Infield, Barry Rand, Luigi Vanfretti, Costa Samaras and Antonio Conejo for advising and encouraging me in the past couple of years of my faculty job search. The process was tough, sometimes dubious (if not outright scandalous in a few cases), but the support from these people kept me going!

In a few months I will be recruiting for 3 fully-funded PhD positions to join DEgIDAL. Stay tuned & reach out.

Respice.  Adspice.  Prospice.

 

2023 IEEE ISGT NA panel & contest, News

Panel at 2023 IEEE ISGT North America & “Ask the Panelists” Contest

December 2022

With the Inflation Reduction Act in the US and similar incentivizing initiatives all over the world, the clean energy transition is – more or less (and hopefully!) – set on long-term and fast(er) tracks. In this context, the roles and impact of grid modernization, its digitalization and the broader space of (what we call) the “smart grid” become rather interesting. This is because the electricity sector has never – practically – suffered from lack of capital. So one may ask why would the recently introduced frameworks matter and justify expectations for significant changes?

With the support of the IEEE Smart Grid, I invited some good friends, colleagues and alumni of my courses at CMU for a panel at the 2023 IEEE North America Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT) conference. Together we will probe the new electricity sector landscape and answer some challenging questions about how the decarbonization of this space must rely on a range of solutions, including, among many others, infrastructure planning, energy security, non-wire alternatives and policy per se. I am grateful to my panelists Clare Callahan (Deloitte & CMU alumni), Doug Houseman (Burns McDonnell), Damir Novosel (Quanta Technology) and Rob Gramlich (Grid Strategies LLC, ex-FERC, ex-PJM & others) for joining me in this 1.5 hours endeavor on Tuesday, Jan. 17th at 12:30 pm ET! Special thanks go out to Hannah Morrey Brown (Burns McDonnell) & Shay Bahramirad (Quanta Technology) whom I had initially invited  as panelists, but needed to kindly defer to colleagues.

But wait… There’s more!

With the support of the Climate Change AI (CCAI) Initiative we are organizing a contest for questions for our panelists. The top-5 submitters (judged by CCAI Power & Energy Community Leads) will win complementary remote live access to the panel, during which they may ask their questions themselves! We are particularly interested in receiving questions from junior researchers and young professionals. The Contest will run until January 10th 23:59 AoE. The link to the contest is here. Best of luck to all of you!

 

News, Power & Energy at 2022 IEEE WF IoT

Power & Energy Vertical Track at the 2022 IEEE World Forum on Internet of Things

May 2022

I am sincerely excited to co-chair the Power & Energy Vertical Track at the 2022 IEEE World Forum on Internet-of-Things (WF IoT), in Yokohama, Japan, coming November. I have happily chaired the same track in the last installment of the WF and I look forward to putting together multiple sessions of researchers and experts on all things (“Internet of… things” – see what I did there?) energy and power systems.

My track co-chair Sérgio Ivan Lopes, Technology and Management School of the Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo (ESTG-IPVC), and I will be reaching out to many of you who can contribute to the subjects of interest. The contributions may also be remote/online. A paper track is planned, too, and I will be updating this announcement with submission and deadline details soon.

If you want to nominate yourself or someone you know as a contributor to the Energy & Power Vertical Track of the 2022 IEEE WF on IoT, please reach out. I will be delighted to have you!

AI & ML seminar at Stanford Feb. 24, News

Seminar at Bits & Watts (Stanford) on Machine Learning & AI for Power Systems

January 2022

I am very excited with Dr. Liang Min‘s invitation to present my Smart Grid works on power system control with machine learning and artificial intelligence in the framework of the Bits & Watts Initiative at Stanford! The seminar will take place on Feb. 24th and I will go over the use of top-down heuristically inducted binary decision trees to procure firm capacity by renewables with volatility, and on how voltage control can be modeled as a problem of classical mechanics physics. I look forward to hearing attendees’ ideas and thoughts on other machine learning and AI applications in power system optimization, planning and control.

The seminar will be in-person, so if you are faculty, student & researcher at Stanford and would like us to meet before/after the seminar, please, do not hesitate to reach out!

AI & ML seminar at RPI Sep. 29, News

Seminar at RPI on Power System Control with Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence

August 2021

I want to thank Prof. Mona Mostafa Hella and Dr. Luigi Vanfretti, my friend and collaborator at the North American Synchrophasor Initiative (NASPI), for inviting me to offer a seminar at the Dept. of Electrical, Computer & Systems Engineering at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on September 29th. I will review 2 of my works on generation control with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). I will start by discussing how to use top-down heuristically inducted binary decision trees of ML to actively control firm capacity by volatile resources operated (among others units) as a Virtual Power Plant. In the second part, I will present how voltage control can be modeled as a problem of classical mechanics physics; from there it can be solved as an AI implementation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics to redispatch active and reactive power generation. I plan to spark a discussion on conceiving new ML applications and AI models for power system operational control and monitoring.

The seminar will be virtual, but I will make myself available to all faculty, students & researchers of RPI, who would like us to talk before/after the seminar, so, please, do not hesitate to reach out!