Our Energy Informatics Research Agenda: Adding Bits to Energy

Speaker:        Professor Hans-Arno Jacobsen
                Middleware Systems Research Group (msrg.org)

Title:          "Our Energy Informatics Research Agenda: Adding Bits to
                 Energy"

Date:           Wednesday, 12 August 2015

Time:           2:00pm - 3:00pm

Venue:          Room 3588 (via lifts 27/28), HKUST

Abstract:

Energy Informatics is an emerging interdisciplinary domain that lies at
the intersection of energy system, power systems, economics, computer
engineering, and computer science. Energy Informatics studies information
and communication technology means to more effectively manage energy
resources, fossil resources as well as renewable resources. Energy
Informatics includes topics such as smart (power) grids, smart meters,
demand response, smart buildings, plug-in electrical vehicles, energy
storage, energy policy, energy markets and market mechanisms, etcetera.

In this talk, I provide a view on Energy Informatics from the perspective
of a computer scientist. I describe the efforts we have undertaken over
the past few years to shape this area in teaching, in community building,
and in research. I will focus on a number of our recent research efforts
that draw on crowd-sourcing to determine power distribution network maps,
machine learning to forecast household energy consumption, and, generally
speaking, the formulation of optimization problems to effectively
aggregate storage resources.

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Biography:

Hans-Arno Jacobsen is a professor of Computer Engineering and Computer
Science and directs the activities of the Middleware Systems Research
Group. He conducts research at the intersection of distributed systems and
data management, with particular focus on middleware systems, event
processing, and cyber-physical systems (e.g., smart power grids.) After
studying and completing his Ph.D. in Germany, France, and the U.S., he
engaged in post-doctoral research at INRIA near Paris before moving to the
University of Toronto in 2001. He has been awarded the Alexander von
Humboldt-Professorship to engage in research at the Technische Universitat
Munchen, Germany.