ECE Distinguished-Speaker Seminar - Architectures, Strategies and Theories for Demand Response

The Electrical and Computer Engineering department will be hosting a seminar featuring P. R. Kumar, Professor and Chair of Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. The topic of the seminar will be Architectures, Strategies and Theories for Demand Response.

Abstract

Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are time-varying. To enhance their usage, demand will need to be adjusted to meet supply, rather than the other way around as is traditional. This raises several issues lying at the confluence of economic behavior and elasticity, demand pooling, implicit or explicit storage, information availability, privacy, adaptation and control. This talk will propose several architectures, strategies and theories for demand response.

Speaker Bio

P. R. Kumar obtained his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from I.I.T. Madras in 1973, and the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis, in 1975 and 1977, respectively. From 1977-84 he was a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. From 1985-2011 he was a faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois. Currently he is at Texas A&M University, where he is a University Distinguished Professor and holds the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering.

Kumar has worked on problems in game theory, adaptive control, stochastic systems, simulated annealing, neural networks, machine learning, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, scheduling, wafer fabrication plants and information theory. His research is currently focused on energy systems, wireless networks, secure networking, automated transportation, and cyberphysical systems.

Kumar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering of the USA, and a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule) in Zurich. He received the Outstanding Contribution Award of ACM SIGMOBILE, the IEEE Field Award for Control Systems, the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, and the Fred W. Ellersick Prize of the IEEE Communications Society. He is an ACM Fellow and a Fellow of IEEE. He was a Guest Chair Professor and Leader of the Guest Chair Professor Group on Wireless Communication and Networking at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He is an Honorary Professor at IIT Hyderabad. He is a D. J. Gandhi Distinguished Visiting Professor at IIT Bombay. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, the Alumni Achievement Award from Washington University in St. Louis, and the Daniel C. Drucker Eminent Faculty Award from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois.

For more information regarding this seminar, please contact Prof. Yu Cheng. Phone: 312-567-7996, Email: cheng@iit.edu