August 8th, 2025,1:00-2:00 pm, SEC, Room 6.301
Speaker Bio: Samuel Talkington is a Ph.D.
candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech and a National
Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. His research focuses on designing
fast, reliable algorithms for inference and control in electric power networks,
drawing on applied mathematics, graph theory, and statistical learning to meet
the challenges of tomorrow's grid.
July 15th, 2025, 2:30-3:30 pm, SEC, Room 3.314
Speaker Bio: Ignacio Aravena is a Principal Member of Research Staff and the Group Leader of the Optimization and Control Group at the Computational Engineering Division of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His research lies at the intersection of advanced power systems models, novel or specialized optimization algorithms, and high-performance computing. Examples of his work include the development of asynchronous and decentralized algorithms for scheduling problems in power grids, analysis of zonal energy market designs, algorithms for power system restoration, and algorithms for power systems on hybrid CPU-GPU architectures. Ignacio holds BS and MS degrees on Electrical Engineering from Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria (UTFSM, Chile) and a PhD on Applied Mathematics from the Universite catholique de Louvain (Belgium). Formerly, he served as lecturer in Electrical Engineering at UTFSM and in Integer Programming at the University of California at Berkeley. Ignacio has also worked as an Optimization Specialist at ENEL Generacion (Chile) and served as a consultant for Powel AS (Norway).
May 15th, 2025, 3:00 - 4:00 pm, SEC, Room 2.112
Speaker Bio:
Shaolei
Ren is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the
University of California, Riverside. His research broadly focuses on AI,
energy, and public health. His work has generated societal impacts, shaping AI
policies incorporated into governance frameworks by international organizations
such as the United Nations, UNESCO, and WHO. Additionally, his work has driven
industry innovations, including the first real-time water footprint reporting
tool for computing. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2015) and
several paper awards, including at ACM e-Energy (2024, 2016) and IEEE ICC
(2016). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Please visit his homepage for more details: https://shaoleiren.github.io/
April 8th, 2025, 12:30 - 1:30 pm, SEC, Room 6.301 (RSVP), or Zoom (Password: 927603)
Speaker Bio: Prof. Ayse K. Coskun is a full professor at Boston University (BU) at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, where she leads the Performance and Energy Aware Computing Laboratory (PeacLab) to solve problems towards making computer systems more intelligent and energy-efficient. Coskun is also the Director of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) at BU, a research center themed on intelligent systems. Coskun’s research interests intersect design automation, large-scale computer systems, and applied machine learning. Her research outcomes are culminated in several technical awards, including the IEEE CEDA Ernest Kuh Early Career Award, an IBM Faculty Award, and an IEEE TCAD Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award. Coskun currently serves as the Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computer Aided Design. Coskun is also the Chief Scientist at Emerald AI, a venture focused on implementing flexible computing at scale in real-world AI data centers. She received her PhD degree in Computer Engineering from University of California San Diego.
December 3rd, 2024, 12:45 - 1:45pm, SEC, Room 5.403
Speaker Bio: Noman Bashir is the Computing & Climate Postdoctoral Impact Fellow at MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium (MCSC). Noman is a computer systems researcher focused on improving the sustainability of computing. His work pushes the boundaries of computer systems design and operation to address emerging challenges of rapidly rising computing demand, increasing electric grid constraints, and growing complexity in datacenters' local energy systems. He takes the requisite multidisciplinary approach that integrates domain-specific knowledge from energy systems and industrial ecology with advanced computer systems approaches to develop high-impact solutions at all layers of computer system stacks and all steps in their lifecycles. In manifesting real-world impact, his work has enhanced the resource efficiency of Google's datacenters and powered community testbeds for carbon-efficient applications. For more details, please visit his webpage at https://noman-bashir.github.io/.
October 29th, 2024,12:15-1:00 pm, SEC, Room 3.314
Speaker Bio:
Robert Davidson is Vice President, Grid
Reliability Projects and Planning of the Alberta Electric System Operator
(AESO). Mr. Davidson has over 25 years of utility experience in the power
industry, having previously worked with ENMAX Power Corporation, Primary
Engineering and Construction, Dairyland Power Cooperative and the Mid-Continent
Area Power Pool. Throughout his career, he has been involved in transmission
and distribution planning, transmission and distribution customer connections,
distribution design, system operations engineering, and regulatory and
strategic business planning. Mr.
Davidson holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from North
Dakota State University, a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from Jamestown
College, and the designation of Professional Engineer with the Association of
Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta.