Speakers

 Professor Shmuel S. Oren, University of California at Berkeley, USA

Shmuel S. Oren is a Professor with the Graduate School and The Earl J. Isaac Chair Professor with the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. He received the B.S and M.S degrees in mechanical engineering from the Technion, Haifa, Israel, and the M.S and Ph.D. degrees in engineering economic systems from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. He is a Co-founder and the Berkeley site director, of PSerc, a multi-university Power Systems Engineering Research Center. He has also been a Member of the California ISO Market Surveillance Committee and a consultant to many private and public entities in the US and abroad. His research interests include economic analysis, planning, optimization, and market design of energy and power systems. He is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, Life Fellow of the IEEE, and Fellow of INFORMS. He was also the recipient of the INFORMS ENRE 2021 Hoteling Medal for lifetime achievement in Energy and the 2021 IEEE PES Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award.

 Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Pascal Van Hentenryck is the A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Professor at Georgia Tech., the director of the NSF Artificial Intelligence Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4OPT), and the director of Tech-AI, the AI hub at Georgia Tech. Van Hentenryck’s research focuses on artificial intelligence for engineering and science and, in particular, energy, supply chains and manufacturing, transportation, and health care. Earlier in his career, Van Hentenryck designed and implemented several widely used optimization systems, including the constraint programming language CHIP (the foundation of modern constraint-programming systems) and the modeling language OPL (now an IBM product). He is a fellow of AAAI and INFORMS. He has taught undergraduate and graduate classes in computer science (including computer systems, programming languages, and introductory programming), in engineering (discrete optimization, constraint programming, and infrastructure optimization), and in computational biology. He has won the Philip J. Bray Award at Brown University in 2010, the Teaching Excellence Award for Online Teaching at Georgia Tech in 2021, and the Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award at Georgia Tech in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

 Professor Le Xie, Harvard University, USA

Le Xie is the Gordon McKay Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard John A. Paulson School Of Engineering And Applied Sciences. He was on the faculty of Texas A&M Electrical and Computer Engineering Department from 2010 to 2024. He received B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2004, S.M. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard in 2005, and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon in 2009. His industry experience includes work at ISO-New England and Edison Mission Energy Marketing and Trading. His research interest includes modeling and control in data-rich large-scale systems, grid integration of clean energy resources, and electricity markets. Dr. Xie is a Fellow of IEEE, IEEE PES Distinguished Lecturer, and recipient of several prestigious awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the 2021 IEEE Technical Committee on Cyber-Physical Systems Mid-Career Award, and the 2017 IEEE PES Outstanding Young Engineer Award. He was the recipient of Texas A&M Dean of Engineering Excellence Award, ECE Outstanding Professor Award, and TEES Select Young Fellow. He serves or have served on the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Power Systems (Senior Editor), IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, and IET Transaction on Smart Grid. He is the founding chair of IEEE PES Subcommittee on Big Data & Analytics for Grid Operations. His team received the IEEE PES Technical Committee Prize Paper award, and multiple Best Paper awards at North American Power Symposium 2012, IEEE SmartGridComm 2013, HICSS 2019 and 2021, IEEE Sustainable Power & Energy Conference 2019, and IEEE PES General Meeting 2020/2023.

 Associate Professor Ram Rajagopal, Stanford University, USA

Ram Rajagopal is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab (S3L), focused on large-scale monitoring, data analytics and stochastic control for infrastructure networks, in particular, power networks. His current research interests in power systems are in the integration of renewables, smart distribution systems, and demand-side data analytics. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and an M.A. in Statistics, both from the University of California Berkeley, Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas, Austin and Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Powell Foundation Fellowship, Berkeley Regents Fellowship and the Makhoul Conjecture Challenge award. He holds more than 30 patents and several best paper awards from his work and has advised or founded various companies in the fields of sensor networks, power systems, and data analytics.

 Assistant Professor Daniel Molzahn, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA 

Daniel Molzahn joined the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech in Spring 2019. Prior to this position, Dr. Molzahn was a computational engineer at Argonne National Laboratory in the Center for Energy, Environmental, and Economic Systems Analysis, where he currently holds an affiliate position. He was a Dow Postdoctoral Fellow in Sustainability in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan. He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and the Master’s of Public Affairs degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His research interests focus on developing optimization and control algorithms to improve the reliability, resiliency, equity, and efficiency of electric power systems. He has received the 2021 IEEE Power and Energy Society Outstanding Young Engineer Award, the 2022 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and several outstanding teacher awards at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Alex Papalexopoulos, ECCO International Inc., and ZOME Energy Networks, USA

Alex D. Papalexopoulos, a global energy expert, is the President & CEO of ECCO International, based in San Francisco, California, which provides consulting and software services in the areas of energy market design and implementation, energy transition and smart grid development to a wide range of clients such as Governments, Regulators, ISOs/RTOs/TSOs/PXs, Utilities, Generators and Traders. Over the last 25 years Alex has designed and implemented organized energy markets in about 15 countries in North and South America, Western and Eastern Europe and Asia. He is also CEO and Chairman of the Board of ZOME Energy networks, an energy software company which implements Energy Management Programs for the mass residential and commercial building market and creates Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) to offer services in the wholesale energy markets and solve grid problems. He has published hundreds of IEEE transaction papers and reports, he is the 1992 recipient of PG&E's Wall of Fame Award, the 1996 recipient of IEEE’s First Prize Paper Award and a Fellow of IEEE. Alex received the Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US. In 2016 he was bestowed the award of the honorary Professor at the University of Patras, Greece.

Dr. Jean-Paul Watson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA

Dr. Jean-Paul Watson (“JP”) is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in Livermore California. At LLNL, he is the Associate Program Lead for Climate-Infrastructure Resilience in the Global Security Directorate. JP leads a diverse team of researchers focused on developing advanced analytics for critical infrastructure operations, planning, and resilience – emphasizing decision-making under uncertainty. He is co-inventor of the widely used Pyomo algebraic modeling language for mathematical optimization (www.pyomo.org), and has co-authored over 75 journal articles, 30 conference papers, and 3 books. JP has received the R&D 100 award, the INFORMS Computing Society Prize, and was an INFORMS Edelman finalist.