By Farrokh Rahimi

As Technical Chair, I would like to welcome you to the twelfth Innovative Smart Grid Technologies / North America (ISGT NA). This is the first time ISGT NA is held as a virtual conference. In the technical program we tried to strike a balance between several competing constraints, namely accommodating attendees participating from different time zones, avoiding simultaneous sessions so that attendees would not be forced to choose among concurrent sessions of their interest, and the duration of sessions. Accordingly, while we allocated full time slots for presentations and Q&A to keynote and plenary panels, we bifurcated the panel sessions into pre-recorded presentations made available two-weeks ahead of the conference, and 30 minute live Q&A sessions in non-overlapping time slots during the conference. For the Poster Sessions we emulated the simultaneous venue in the face-to-face conferences, but to facilitate virtual access to live discussions we grouped the accepted papers into 15 parallel poster sessions.

The plenary chair and vice chair, Dr. Veronika Rabl and Dr. Ebrahim Vaahedi assembled a team of veteran industry, government, and academic experts to deliver the keynote and plenary presentations.

The technical review team under Prof. Masood Parvania and Mr. Charlie Hanley received 197 papers and through a rigorous review process accepted 135. Seven among the papers with highest review scores were subsequently reviewed to select the best paper award recipient.

The panel review committee co-chaired by Mr. Dale Player of ComEd and me received 33 panel session proposals, and with assistance from the panel review team selected the top 24 for the available program time slots.

On behalf of the ISGT NA technical team and the entire Organizing Committee I would like to thank our keynote and plenary speakers, panelists and panel moderators, the authors and the poster session moderators, our volunteers, and all of our attendees, and I hope you find the technical program stimulating and fruitful, and actively engage in the live Q/A discussions and exchanges.