Invited speakers and panelists

Tariq Samad holds the Honeywell/W.R. Sweatt Chair and is Senior Fellow at the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota. He joined TLI in 2016 after a 30-year career with Honeywell, retiring as Corporate Fellow with Honeywell Automation and Control Solutions and the Global Innovation Leader for the business. During his career with Honeywell he led and contributed to automation and control technology developments for applications in clean energy, electric power systems, building management, the process industries, automotive engines, unmanned aircraft, and advanced manufacturing.

Dr. Samad is a past president of the American Automatic Control Council and IEEE Control Systems Society. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and AAIA and the recipient of a few awards including the IEEE CSS Control Systems Technology Award, a Distinguished Member Award from IEEE CSS, and an IEEE Third Millennium Medal.. He is the founding chair of the IFAC Industry Committee and serves on the IFAC Council. Dr. Samad holds 20 patents and has authored or coauthored over 100 publications. His book publications include the Encyclopedia of Systems and Control (co-editor-in-chief, Springer, 2014; 2nd edition, 2020). He was editor-in-chief of IEEE Press and is currently the founding editor of the Wiley/IEEE Press Book Series on Technology Management, Innovation, and Leadership. He serves on the boards of Clean Energy Economy Minnesota and IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society, where he is the Vice President for Publications. Dr. Samad holds a B.S. degree in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Alessandra Parisio is a Reader in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Manchester, UK, where she is/has been a principal or co-investigator on research projects supported by EPSRC, Innovate UK, EC H2020, and industrial partners in the areas of building energy management and distributed control for flexibility service and grid support provision, totaling over £5 million as University of Manchester share. 

Dr. Parisio is an IEEE senior member, Co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Smart Buildings, and vice-chair for Education of the IFAC Technical Committee 9.3. Control for Smart Cities. She is the Director of the MSc programme "Renewable Energy and Clean Technology (REaCT)". She has been in the program committees of several international conferences and serves as editor of the Elsevier journal Sustainable Energy, Grids and Networks (SEGAN), the IEEE Transactions on Automation and Science Engineering, and on Control of Network Systems. Dr. Parisio received the IEEE PES Outstanding Engineer Award in January 2021 and the Energy and Buildings Best Paper Award (for a ten-year period between 2008-2017) in January 2019. Her main research interests include the areas of energy management systems under uncertainty, model predictive control, stochastic constrained control, and distributed optimization for power systems.

Dr. Mathias Hudoba de Badyn is an associate professor in the Department of Technology Systems (ITS) at the University of Oslo. From 2019-2023, he was a postdoc at the Automatic Control Lab at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, working with John Lygeros and Roy Smith. Before working at ETH, he did his PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, with Mehran Mesbahi on distributed control theory.

Mathias works on problems involving the control and estimation of networked dynamical systems, with an emphasis on applications related to sustainability. In particular, using algebraic graph theory, he studies how the structure of the network affects the performance of distributed control, estimation, and optimization algorithms. His target domain is the coordination of smart buildings and energy hubs, and how they can be interconnected with the electric grid and other utilities to provide services to suppliers, such as demand-side management and peak shaving. He also works on aerospace applications, focusing on the guidance, navigation, and control of multi-vehicle systems. These range from swarms of UAVs to distributed satellite systems.

Pulkit Nahata is a senior scientist with the Power Systems Laboratory at ETH Zürich. He is also affiliated with NCCR Automation, where he is leading the technology transfer initiatives in the power and energy sector. Previously, Pulkit worked as a propulsion control engineer at Alstom Switzerland, focusing on the development of control algorithms for traction converters and auxiliary supply systems. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from EPFL and an MSc in systems and control from ETH Zürich, and he seeks to fast-​track the transition to sustainable energy by bridging the gap between theory and practice. 

Matthew Deakin is a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at Newcastle University, UK, a position he has held since 2022. Previously, he was a Research Associate, also at Newcastle University. Matthew received his PhD in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford in 2020, during which he held a Clarendon Scholarship. His research interests control and operation of power distribution systems, and novel power electronics topologies for providing energy system services.