Dr. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
Keynote at ADCOM 2016
Title: The Energy-Transportation Nexus & the Emergence of Cognitive IOT Systems
Abstract: This talk will overview the concept of Cognitive IOT (Internet of Things) where the combination of advanced machine learning with IOT can enable transformative cyber-physical systems. We take the specific focus of the Energy and Transportation ecosystems. With the rapid growth in deployment of renewables, and the early emergence of lower cost energy storage and electric vehicles, a virtuous energy-transport nexus is in play. The modularity of these energy building blocks is driving a decentralization of market power, significant increase in uncertainty/variability on the grid, and and the early emergence of a virtualization layer that orchestrates these assets to deliver a variety of end user services.
At IBM Research, we are developing smarter energy solutions that can either be cloud-based or in decentralized realizations, for the customer domain and to help utilities in their transition to manage uncertainty. This talk will overview the market challenges and examples of research work especially from “Eastern” markets such as India, Australia and projects done in Brunei. A sample of topics covered include: distributed demand response (nplugs) inspired by power cuts in India & adaptive solar injection (iplug, which is the inverse of the nplug idea), participative micro-grids in Brunei, experiments with re-used laptop batteries for street vendors, commercial fine-grained building management analytics in Australia, solar forecasting via model blending, and a new personalised shared (EV) transportation model .
The Indian market is poised for a significant uptake in renewables (especially solar + wind) and already a huge market for diesel substitution/UPS systems in all sectors (commercial, telecom towers, residential, industrial); but has a weak electricity grid. Inspired by this context of solar in India, we overview a new IOT-based approach we are developing called “photonic energy harvesting” to change the nature of solar PV systems to being more software-defined.
Bio:
Shivkumar Kalyanaraman is Program Director, Special Initiatives and Dept Head, Cognitive Industry Solutions in IBM Research – India. He has served as the Chief Scientist of IBM Research – Australia (2013-2015), and served in earlier senior management roles for teams in systems, wireless, networking and smarter planet solutions at IBM Research – India since 2008. In 2010 he was part of a founding team of the UBD | IBM Centre, a nationally significant Smarter Planet collaboration between the country of Brunei and IBM; and directed this centre till 2013. Before joining IBM, he was a Professor at the Department of Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He received a B.Tech degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in July 1993, followed by M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the Ohio State University in 1994 and 1997 respectively. He also holds an Executive M.B.A. (EMBA) degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (2005).
His current research interests are in large-scale cyber-physical systems (“smarter planet”) problems such as energy, natural resources, water, transportation, network traffic, and the application of ideas inspired from computing, wireless and networking in these domains. He served as the TPC Co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2008, General co-chair of ACM SIGCOMM 2010 in New Delhi, and is the General Co-Chair of ACM e-Energy 2015 in Bangalore, India. He served on the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions of Networking. He is a Fellow of the IEEE (2010), Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering (2015), ACM Distinguished Scientist (2010), and was recognized by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine in 1999 as a TR100 young innovator.
