Andlinger Center Highlight Seminar Series: Online Optimization & Energy
Adam Wierman, Caltech
Thursday, October 15, 2020 at 12:30-1:30 pm ET
Zoom seminar. Please register for the event on Zoom.

Online optimization is a powerful framework in machine learning that has seen numerous applications to problems in energy and sustainability. In my group at Caltech, we began by applying online optimization to ‘right-size’ capacity in data centers nearly a decade ago; and by now tools from online optimization have been applied to develop algorithms for geographical load balancing among data centers, demand response, generation planning, energy storage management, and beyond. In this talk, I will highlight both the applications of online optimization and the theoretical progress that has been driven by applications in energy and sustainability. Over a decade, we have moved from designing algorithms for one-dimensional problems with restrictive assumptions on costs to general results for high-dimensional, non-convex problems that highlight the role of constraints, predictions, delay, multi-timescale control, and more.