Silicon Valley Seminar November

Online

Date: Thursday, November 21
Time: 5:30 – 7:00 pm

If you would like to attend, register in advance for this webinar.

After the webinar, you are invited to talk to the speaker and mingle with other alumni in a post-webinar social via a Zoom meeting.

We look forward to seeing you.

Peter Tong

Decarbonization of Energy Systems
By Steven Low

In this talk, I will first explain the major challenges to electrify transportation and to generate electricity from clean renewable source by mid-century. Then I will present two pieces of recent research, one on smart EV charging and the other on optimal power flow (OPF).

The Adaptive Charging Network (ACN), a smart EV charging infrastructure, was first deployed at Caltech in early 2016 and subsequently commercialized. The ACN architecture enables EV charging at scale via model-predictive control. I will describe its design and deployment, and explain an open-source research tool based on the Caltech CAN. The tool has provided the research community with fine-grained EV charging data (ACN-Data) and a realistic simulator (ACN-Sim).

The OPF problems underlying numerous smart grid operations is hard in theory, but seems “easy’’ in practice because, empirically, semidefinite relaxations of OPF or local algorithms often yield global solutions. I will present necessary or sufficient conditions for an OPF problem to both have exact relaxation and no spurious local optima.

Steven is the F. J. Gilloon Professor of the Computing & Mathematical Sciences Department and Electrical Engineering Department at Caltech. Before that, he was with AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, and the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has held honorary/chaired professorship in Australia, China and Taiwan.

Steven was a co-recipient of IEEE best paper awards, an awardee of the IEEE Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award, and the ACM SIGMETRICS Test of Time Award. He is also a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and CSEE.

Steven was well-known for work on Internet congestion control and semidefinite relaxation of optimal power flow problems in smart grid. His research on networks has been accelerating more than 1TB of Internet traffic every second since 2014. Steven’s research on smart grid is providing large-scale workplace electric vehicle charging, delivering 130K miles/day in 2022. He received his B.S. from Cornell and PhD from Berkeley, both in EE.

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Our Alumni Volunteers‍

The following alumni work together to serve you:
Avni Gandhi, Dave Adler, Jane Frommer, Mike Klein, Xinh Huynh, and Peter Tong.