Melike Erol-Kantarci

In the past decade, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled the modernization of the power grid and have led to many advances in smart grid technologies. Smart grid communications facilitate a large number of grid operations, including advanced metering, fault monitoring, microgrid control, transactive energy systems and so on. In parallel to advances in smart grids, communication technologies have been continuously evolving to provide better service to mobile users and vertical industries. Recently, machine learning has showed promising performance improvements in communication networks as well as smart grid operations. In this talk, we introduce novel AI-based tools that will allow a P2P energy trading platform, consisting of microgrids, to become a part of the future transactive energy systems. The energy trading platform relies on robust smart grid communications. We will show our recent results on low-latency communications that use reinforcement learning to support communication needs of such energy trading platforms.

Biography:

Melike Erol-Kantarci is Canada Research Chair in AI-enabled Next-Generation Wireless Networks and Associate Professor at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. She is the founding director of the Networked Systems and Communications Research (NETCORE) laboratory. She is a Faculty Affiliate at the Vector Institute, Toronto, and the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at University of Ottawa. She has over 150 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 6000 times and she has an h-index of 39. She has received numerous awards and recognitions. Recently, she received the 2020 Distinguished Service Award of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee on Green Communications and Computing and she was named as N2Women Stars in Computer Networking and Communications in 2019. Dr. Erol-Kantarci has delivered 50+ keynotes, tutorials and panels around the globe and has acted as the general chair and technical program chair for many international conferences and workshops. Her main research interests are AI-enabled wireless networks, 5G and 6G wireless communications, smart grid and Internet of things. She is an IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Senior member and ACM Senior Member.