Plenary Session P2 – Tuesday
Multidisciplinarity Research. Power System and Computational Intelligence
25 June, 10:30-12:10
Room: TBD
Session Chair:
Antonio Volpin, Senior Partner, McKinsey’s Electric Power & Natural Gas Practice in the Asia–Pacific region
Keynote speakers:
Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy, Duke Energy Distinguished Professor of Power Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, SC
David Hill, Chair of Electrical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong (📁 slides)
Yilu Liu, Governor’s Chair Professor, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Short biographies:
Antonio Volpin
Antonio Volpin is a Senior Partner of McKinsey&Company, which he joined in 1993.
He has been serving for over twenty-five years clients in the electric power sector (generation, transmission, distribution and sales) in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America, Asia and Australia.
His key area of work has been strategy for power companies. He has advised some of the world sector leaders on growth and market strategies. He has also advised regulators and governments on how to create competitive yet investors’ friendly regulation. He has supported as power expert several projects on energy access for the United Nations and the IFC.
He has authored several papers about the electric sector. In 2018 he published “how utilities can keep the lights on”, which is a strategic perspective on the evolution of the power sector globally.
Until 2015 he was the leader of the Electric Power and Natural Gas practice of McKinsey&Company for Europe, the Middle East and Africa out of London. He is currently the leader of the practice for Asia and Australia, based in Singapore.
Prior to joining McKinsey, he worked as junior researcher at the Computer Science Department of the University of Padua.
He graduated with honours in Electrical Engineering and Computers Science at the University of Padua, and got a Master in Business Administration at the Bocconi Business School in Milan.
Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy
Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy is the Duke Energy Distinguished Professor of Power Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Automotive Engineering at Clemson University. Prior to that, he was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), Rolla, USA from 2002 to 2011. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is the Founder (2004) and Director of the Real-Time Power and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (http://rtpis.org). He holds an Honorary Professor position in the School of Engineering at the University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. Dr. Venayagamoorthy received his Ph.D. and MSc(Eng) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, in February 2002 and April 1999, respectively. He received his BEng (Honors) degree with a First Class from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi, Nigeria in March 1994. He holds a MBA degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Clemson University, SC.
Dr. Venayagamoorthy’s interests are in the research, development and innovation of smart grid technologies and operations, including intelligent sensing and monitoring, intelligent systems, integration of renewable energy sources, power system optimization, stability and control, and signal processing. He has published over 500 refereed technical articles. His publications are cited over 15,500 times with a h-index of 61 and i10-index of 246. Dr. Venayagamoorthy has been involved in over 75 sponsored projects in excess of US $10 million. Dr. Venayagamoorthy has given over 500 invited keynotes, plenaries, presentations, tutorials and lectures in over 40 countries to date. He has several international educational and research collaborations.
Dr. Venayagamoorthy is involved in the leadership and organization of many conferences including the General Chair of the Annual Power System Conference (Clemson, SC, USA) since 2013, and Pioneer and Chair/co-Chair of the IEEE Symposium of Computational Intelligence Applications in Smart Grid (CIASG) since 2011. He is currently the Chair of the IEEE PES Working Group on Intelligent Control Systems, and the Founder and Chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Task Force on Smart Grid. Dr. Venayagamoorthy has served as Editor/Guest Editor of several IEEE Transactions and Elsevier Journals. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the IET, UK, and the SAIEE.
David Hill
Professor David Hill joined the staff of The University of Hong Kong in 2013. He directs the Centre for Electrical Energy Systems (established by Professor Felix Wu in 1996) and is the Project Coordinator for the RGC Theme-based Research Scheme (Round 4) Project total funding HK$50.4M on Sustainable Power Delivery Structures for High Renewables (with Co-Is from HKU, HK University of Science and Technology, HK Polytechnic University, Imperial College London and the University of Sydney).
Prior to joining HKU, he held the Chair of Electrical Engineering at The University of Sydney, Australia, initially during 1994-2002 and again 2010-2013 (supported by Ausgrid). He established the Centre for Future Energy Networks (CFEN), and was Director, 2010-2018. During 1996-1999, he served as Head of the School of Electrical and Information Engineering. He has twice held Australian Research Council (ARC) Professorial Fellowships. During 2005-2010, he was an ARC Federation Fellow at the Australian National University (only 25 awarded internationally per year for all areas) and, from 2006, also a Theme Leader (Complex Networks) and Deputy Director in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems. During 2010-2013, he held an ARC Professorial Fellowship at the University of Sydney. In Sydney, he continues to collaborate with researchers in CFEN on projects in the area of Future Grid, including in the CSIRO University Cluster, 2013-2016, which he played a leading role in establishing.
He has been continuously associated with Hong Kong universities since 2001 when he was a visiting Professor at City University of HK (CityU). He served on the Panel for Electrical and Electronic Engineering in the University Grants Committee Research Assessment Exercise for 1999. During 2001-2004, he was Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Electronic Engineering at CityU. During 2012-2013, he held a visiting Chair Professorship under the Distinguished Scholars Scheme in the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering at PolyU. He currently holds honorary or adjunct professorships at CityU, South China University of Technology, Wuhan University, Northeastern University, Changsha University of Science and Technology and Chongging University, China.
He has also held academic and substantial visiting positions at the universities of Melbourne, California (Berkeley), Newcastle (Australia), Lund (Sweden) and Munich (TUM). He has numerous international professional involvements, mainly with IEEE and IFAC as well as independent conferences and workshops including PSCC, IREP and IWCSN.
He has been invited to speak at many panels and workshops and to give keynote addresses at international conferences including for 2018-19: workshops in the series Mathematics of Energy Systems, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK; the Applied Energy “A+B” Conference, MIT, USA; an invited panel at IEEE PES General Meeting, Atlanta, USA and plenary speeches at MTNS2018, Hong Kong; PSCC, Dublin, 2018; and PowerTech, Milan, 2019 all on aspects of power grids and system theory. He has several editorial roles including: an Editor for the Springer Book Series on Power Electronics and Power Systems; on the Editorial Board for the journals Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks (SEGAN), the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems (IJEPES), Foundations and Trends in Electric Energy Systems and Journal of Control and Decision (China). He has several other advisory editor roles.
Yilu Liu
Yilu Liu received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Ohio State University, Columbus, in 1986 and 1989. She received the B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University, China.
Dr. Liu is currently the UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). She is also the deputy director of the DOE/NSF engineering research center CURENT (curent.utk.edu). She led the effort to create the North American power grid Frequency Monitoring Network FNET/GridEye (fnetpublic.utk.edu, powerit.utk.edu). Dr. Liu is an expert in large grid dynamic modeling and simulations.
Dr. Liu is a member of National Academy of Engineering, a member of the National Academy of inventors, a fellow of IEEE. She can be reached at Liu@utk.edu.