Sylvie Thiébaux

Professor The Australian National University

Sylvie Thiébaux is a professor of computer science at The Australian National University. Her research interests are in automated planning, scheduling, diagnosis, and search, their integration with optimisation, machine learning, and verification, as well as their applications to energy and transport. Her recent work, which has received multiple academic and industry awards, focuses on handling constraints in planning under uncertainty, on learning generalised policies and heuristics, and on coordinating distributed energy resources to benefit their owners, the distribution grid, and energy markets. Sylvie is a a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a co-editor in chief of the Artificial Intelligence journal. She is a former councilor of AAAI, co-chair and president of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), and director of the Canberra Laboratories of NICTA.

AI on a Beautiful Island: Building the Future of Electricity Networks

September 02 2:45 pm - 3:45 pm (CEST)

Australia has the largest uptake of residential rooftop solar per-capita, and within the next few decades, nearly half of its electricity will be produced by consumers. Achieving this in a cost-effective and reliable way requires the ability to coordinate the actions of these consumer-owned energy systems so that they benefit not only their owners but also the electricity network. In this talk I’ll focus on the CONSORT project, a multi-disciplinary collaboration between academia and industry which developed and trialled this network-aware coordination capability on Bruny Island in Tasmania. I will explain the crucial role played by AI, including planning and scheduling, optimisation, forecasting, and game theory, in coordinating consumer-onwed batteries to manage network constraints, doubling the value of these batteries for the nework, and providing a new source of revenue for consumers.

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