I’m an independent consultant, researcher and developer. I’m passionate about climate change, renewables, and technology, and I love finding new ways to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Currently I am working on developing new methods for forecasting regional solar PV, and for better understanding the carbon emissions of our energy consumption.
From November 2014 to April 2021 I was a senior research scientist at IBM Research Australia. During this time I worked on a number of projects, the most notable ones being:
- Reducing the carbon footprint of IBM’s data centers. I led the Australian team as part of a global effort within IBM to quantify and reduce the carbon footprint of client workloads running on IBM data centers. This involved understanding IT workload energy consumption at hardware level and at data center level, as well as an awareness of the energy mix used to generate electricity at hundreds of global locations. We initiated and led the development of a platform to obtain and store global energy generation data from 70+ public sources. As a team, we demonstrated that carbon footprint savings of more than 90% can be possible for certain workloads.
- Optimal energy storage operation. I led a five-year effort within IBM to optimally operate energy storage systems, taking into account multiple value streams and impact of operation on battery degradation. The research effort involved collaboration with multiple academic and industry partners, including University of Melbourne, ANU, CSIRO, Selectronic, and Relectrify. We successfully applied for state government funding (Victoria New Energy Jobs Fund) to demonstrate implementation of optimal control strategies across a number of real trial sites. Our project was featured in IBM’s annual Corporate Social Responsibility Report and IBM’s annual Environmental Report (both 2020).
Before joining IBM, I spent three years as a postdoc at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where I continue to be an Honorary Research Fellow. My research during this time involved electric vehicles, smart charging, management of distribution networks, and smart grid applications in general.
I completed my MSc and PhD, both in Computer Science, at the University of Oxford, UK (2007 and 2011, respectively), and my BSc at McGill University in Montreal, Canada (2004).
My interests can be summed up as:
- optimisation, machine learning, AI, time series analysis, forecasting
- carbon emissions, renewable generation, energy storage, electric vehicles, distribution networks
- visualisation, simulation, development
CV
For a full CV, please don’t hesitate to email me.
Employment
I continue to be involved in graduate student supervision and joint research in the School of Engineering.
As the lead of a team of research scientists and software engineers, I coordinated research and development across multiple energy-related domains — most recently on reducing the carbon footprint of IBM’s data centers.
As a member of the “Electric Vehicles and the Grid” group, I was responsible for developing a simulation framework to simulate the effects of EV charging on the grid at the distribution level, as well as designing and implementing optimal charging algorithms for large numbers of electric vehicles.
Title of thesis: Role-Based Multi-Robot Exploration
Supervisor: Dr. Stephen Cameron
Examiners: Prof. Paul Newman, Prof. Andreas Birk
Title of thesis: Machine Learning Techniques Applied to Multi-Agent Cooperation
Supervisor: Dr. Stephen Cameron.
Minor Concentration in Philosophy
Please see the Publications page.
Please see the Patents page.
PhD Students – University of Melbourne
I am proud to have (co-) supervised several brilliant PhD students:
- Maneesha Perera (Solar Energy Forecasting)
- Hansani Weeratunge (Geothermal Energy) — now a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne
- Khalid Abdulla (Optimal Energy Storage Operation) – now Senior Systems & Optimisation Engineer at Gravitricity Ltd
- Ramachandra Rao Kolluri (Inverter-Interfaced Microgrids) – now at IBM Research Australia
- Lu Xia (Distributed Demand Response) – now with Optiver (High Frequency Trading)
- Valentin Muenzel (Battery Management Systems) – now CEO of Relectrify (Battery 2nd Life Startup)
IBM Interns
I am proud to have (co-) supervised several excellent interns:
- Bhagya Amarasekara (Energy and IoT)
- Muzaffar Igamberdiev (Energy Demo Development and Forecasting)
- Arjun Chaudhary (Energy Demo Development)
- Sufiyan Ghori (Blockchain and Energy)
- Yijun William Wu (Australian Energy Policy)
- Min Zhang (Deployment of Building Energy Management on Bluemix)
I am currently an Associate Editor for IET Smart Grid.
I have also acted as a reviewer for the following journals and conferences (among others):
- IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid
- IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
- Energies (MDPI)
- Automatica (Elsevier)
- Transportation Research (Elsevier)
- International Journal of Sustainable Transportation (Taylor & Francis)
- IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting
- IFAC World Congress
- ACM e-Energy
- NeurIPS
- IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
- RoboCup Symposia
- IEEE Senior Member
- 06/2022: TPC Co-Chair, ACM e-Energy 2022
- 12/2021: Technical Programme Committee, NeurIPS Workshop – Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning
- 05/2021: Technical Programme Committee, ACM e-Energy 2021
- 05/2021: Technical Programme Committee, AMLIES Workshop, ACM e-Energy 2021
- 05/2020: Technical Programme Committee, ACM e-Energy 2020
- 05/2020: Local Organising Committee, ACM e-Energy 2020
- 05/2019: Technical Programme Committee, ACM e-Energy 2019
- 05/2018: Technical Programme Committee, ACM e-Energy 2018
- 05/2017: Technical Programme Committee, ACM e-Energy 2017
- 01/2017: Technical Programme Committee, WACI Workshop, COMSNETS 2017
- 11/2016: Marketing and Publicity Chair, IEEE ISGT Asia 2016
- 07/2016: Invited Panelist, IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting
- 06/2016: Technical Programme Committee, ACM e-Energy 2016
- 07/2015: Senior Technical Programme Committee, ACM e-Energy 2015
- 07/2015: Associate Chair, C3 Workshop, ACM e-Energy 2015
- 08/2014: Co-chair, invited session at IFAC World Congress “Towards Automated Load Control in Smart Grids”
- 06/2014: Programme Committee, International Workshop on Demand Response (co-located with ACM e-Energy)
- 10/2013: Panelist, panel session at IEEE ISGT Europe on “Smart Meters and Big Data”
I live in Melbourne, Australia with my wife and two children, aged 7 and 5.
I play ice hockey for the Bumble Bees and soccer for the Johnny Cash All Stars 🙂