The Speakers
Dirk Witthaut studied physics at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany where he obtained his Ph.D. in 2017. Afterwards, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany, and as a Guest Lecturer in Kigali, Rwanda. Since 2014, he is heading a Research Group at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. In 2017 he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Cologne. He works on several aspects of power system stability with a focus on cascading failures, frequency stability and the role of intermittent renewable power sources.
Jayakrishnan Nair is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at IIT Bombay. His research draws on tools from queueing theory, applied probability, game theory, and control theory to address performance evaluation and design issues in networks, service systems, and smart power grids.
Florian Steinke is a full professor at TU Darmstadt and heads the Energy Information Networks & Systems lab since 2017. Prior to this, he was with Siemens Corporate Technology where he worked on control systems for island grids with up to 100% renewables and developed a multimodal energy system analysis & optimization tool. In 2009, he received a PhD in Machine Learning for his work at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen (now: MPI for Intelligent Systems). Florian Steinke is the spokesman of the profile area "Future Energy Systems" of the Technical University Darmstadt since 2018.
Sanand is the co-founder, CTO of Climate Connect. In this capacity he leads both technology development, and business strategy. He guides the team with all aspects, ranging from machine learning (ML) algorithm and software development to customer engagement and business development.
After completing his MTech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2006, Sanand worked at Symantec for 3 years in software security product development, then at Goldman Sachs for 2 years building trading systems. He then ventured out into the start-up world focusing on building interesting software and mobile applications.
After getting involved with Climate Connect in its previous form during early 2013 and building data analytics products for the Californian Carbon and Indian Power markets, he led the company's pivot into ML-based predictive analytics for the energy domain.
As a part-time interest, he was a visiting faculty member at the University of Pune, teaching about algorithms and mentoring student projects for postgraduate courses.
Apart from grokking the tech space, Sanand enjoys watching sci-fi movies, camping in national parks, volunteering for tree and tiger conservation, and going on random road trips.
Bharath Ravisankar is a doctoral researcher at ie3, TU Dortmund, Germany. He specializes in the topics of energy efficient production systems, smart factory energy management as well as energy flexibility of factories. Further topics of interests are in the field of machine learning and cognitive systems.
Venkatesh Sarangan is a Principal Scientist at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). He heads the "Next Generation Grids" research at TCS. Before joining TCS Research, he was with the Oklahoma State University as an Associate Professor. He has published more than 60 research papers and has also been on the program committee of conferences on future energy systems. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University, USA. He received the "Distinguished Scientist" award from TCS in 2018.