Year in Review: Meetings and Workshops Committee

In September 2018, we started a new committee within the framework of the IEEE Smart Grid: The Committee on Meetings and Conferences. In addition to the ongoing set of activities in the IEEE Smart Grid, we strongly felt the need to provide a forum for showcasing additional and alternative aspects of the Smart Grid, in the form of conferences and workshops. Given that there are 14 different operating units that make up the IEEE Smart Grid, there is a broad set of interests, expertise, intersections, and viewpoints that needs to be reflected in these gatherings. With this as the goal, the Smart Grid Meetings and Conferences Committee was formed. I was appointed as a Chair mid-2018, and we put together an Advisory Board to oversee the operations of this committee. The board members are Anuradha Annaswamy (Chair), Steve Collier, Laura Pullum, Pete Sauer, and Thomas Strasser.

 

With inputs from the board members, we decided to focus on the following topics: (1) Cybersecurity; (2) Smart Grids for Smart Cities (SG4SC); (3) Enabling technologies such as Big Data, Machine Learning, and AI. For each of the topics, the overall organizational structure is as follows: A local organizing committee will be in charge of organizing a meeting on each of these topics. These may include a general chair, a program chair, a treasurer, and a local arrangements chair. A steering committee will provide oversight for each of these local organizing committees to ensure that the overall planning including the technical program and budget is proceeding smoothly. The steering committee will also ensure that the deliberations of each meeting are recorded and a final report is submitted to IEEE Smart Grid.

We are glad to report that plans for three meetings under the auspices of the IEEE Smart Grid are well underway. The first of these will be held in Atlanta, GA, from December 12-13 (https://attend.ieee.org/smartgridcybercon/). Local organizing committee is headed by Steven Kunsman and Nathan Wallace, while the steering committee chair will be Manimaran Govindarasu. A very good program has been put together, and we would like to request all interested in this topic to join the meeting.

The second conference series being organized by the IEEE Smart Grid Meetings and Conferences is SG4SC 2020. The plan is to organize this meeting in Aachen, Germany, during September 9-11, 2020. The local organizing committee is headed by Anto Monti and Ferdinanda Ponci. The steering committee chair is Thomas Strasser. A call for contributions is coming out very shortly.

The third meeting series will focus on machine learning and related topics with Le Xie of the Texas A&M University as the Steering Committee chair. The tentative plan is to organize a workshop that is collocated with the ISGT in Washington DC, in February 2021. Please look out for more information on this conference in the near future.

All information related to these meetings and conferences will be posted on the IEEE Smart Grid website.

I would like to use this opportunity to request the entire Smart Grid Community to attend and participate in these events. Please reach out to me at aanna@ieee.org or Phyllis Caputo at p.caputo@ieee.org if you are interested in getting involved in either the local organizing committee for future editions or the steering committee.

Anuradha Annaswamy
Chair

For a downloadable copy of the December 2019 eNewsletter which includes this article, please visit the IEEE Smart Grid Resource Center.