Dr. Anurag Sharma, Assistant Professor, Newcastle University, UK

Brief Description : Dr. Anurag Sharma (Member, IEEE) received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore. He is currently Degree Programme Director for MSc in Electrical Power Engineering at Newcastle University (UK), Singapore campus. His research interests are service restoration and grid resiliency, energy management in micro-grids, planning, and integration of distributed energy resources integration, and machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications in power systems. He has delivered numerous invited talks and tutorials on decarbonization and enhancing the resilience of the grid. In addition to his research work, Dr. Sharma is also actively involved in professional and community service. He is currently serving as the Vice-Chair for IEEE PES Singapore Chapter.

Dr. Sayonsom Chanda, Senior Researcher, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, Colorado

Brief Description : Dr Sayonsom Chanda is a smart grid engineer and entrepreneur based in Boulder, Colorado, USA. Dr. Chanda has served in many roles in the energy industry – most recently as a senior researcher of energy systems integration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Denver, Colorado, USA. As a renowned expert in developing artificial intelligence technologies to combat climate change, he has been called to deliver lectures at conferences and panel sessions worldwide, including a TEDx talk in 2021.

Dr. Chanda has 6 years of experience working with three major American electricity distribution companies and two US Department of Energy national laboratories. Dr. Chanda has filed for three patents in cloud computing for the power grid. He has published more than 15 peer-reviewed papers in high-impact power systems journals. His research interests are focused on improving power systems simulation methods, load forecasting, and clean energy technologies to increase energy security and resilience for every individual on Earth.

He received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Washington State University, USA. He is a Member of IEEE and has served as Vice-Chair of the IEEE Young Professionals Society and contributing member of the IEEE USA Energy Policy Committee. As an entrepreneur, Dr. Chanda has been successful in bringing two Cleantech startups to the market. He is also the co-author of a forthcoming title, ‘Resilience of Smart Grid’ by Wiley, UK.

Mr. Pranav Raikote, Senior AI Researcher, Plexflo Grid Analytics, Boulder, Colorado

Brief Description : Pranav Raikote is a Senior AI Researcher at Plexflo, with several years of experience in the field of artificial intelligence and ML applications in the power industry. His work has been used in the industry for improving classical load forecasting applications for utilities in the US. He played a role in developing managed EV-charging programs in large fleets, estimating regional rooftop solar generation potential using satellite imagery, and methods for automated GIS tracking of utility poles using video streams from patrol vehicles. Pranav and his team at Plexflo have been working on Large-Language Models and Generative AI for several years and have contributed to high-impact projects and research work. Pranav is a sought-after speaker in many local industry/academic conferences and student entrepreneurship competitions. In his free time, Mr. Raikote is a prolific contributor to open-source software and writes technical blogs on a variety of AI Topics, sharing his thoughts with the world. He also enjoys wildlife photography and is working on building his portfolio.

Abstract: Generative AI enables systems to create high-value artifacts, such as video, narrative, training data and even designs and schematics. In this tutorial we will show how these capabilities can be used in Power Systems to create constrained simulation models, synthetic data for machine learning applications, etc. We propose a 3-hour session, with two 30-min hands on workshop or live demo sessions of the new technology.

Outline:

1. 1. Introduction to Generative AI

1. 1. Problem? What? Impact?
   2. GANs, VAEs, other Autoregressive models
   3. Applications and famous architectures

2. 2. Applications of “Transformers”

1. 1. Real-world impact – Show examples of how transformers work in other domains like vision, music, and language generation, speech recognition, Music Generation, etc.

3. 3. Training and Evaluating Transformer

1. 1. Demo the Shakespeare MinGPT
   2. Data aspect, HyperParams aspect, Compute aspect
   3. Fine-tuning for Downstream tasks
   4. Evaluation metrics and processes

4. 4. Applications in Power Systems

Duration : 3 hours with 2 hours of lecture and 1 hour of hands-on training