Communications of the ACM
Siebel Institute Seeks to Make the Smart Grid Smarter
New grants from the Siebel Energy Institute are intended to speed development of ways to improve the efficiency, safety and security of emerging digital energy networks.
Credit: Michael Stravato/The New York Times
The Siebel Energy Institute, which announced its first round of grants this week, has a mission to meet the challenge of enhancing the global power grid with intelligent software. The grants are designed to expedite the development of algorithms and machine-learning tools to make emergent digital energy networks more efficient, safer, and more secure.
"What we're trying to do is accelerate things as we build out this cyberphysical system," says software entrepreneur Thomas Siebel. "This is big data meets the Internet of Things in the energy infrastructure, a field that is in its infancy but is going to change the world."
With seed funding of $10 million, the institute has issued 24 $25,000 and $50,000 grants to recipients developing software for equipment failure forecasting, using smartphones as monitoring sensors, and simulating power-grid security risks, among other projects. Siebel says the institute plans for its smaller grants to help foster innovative research projects that then receive major funding from government agencies.
"We're taking our physical infrastructure of energy and putting a cyberheart in it," notes institute director S. Shankar Sastry. "And we need to rethink what this instrumenting of the world--all that data being generated and collected--means for privacy and how all this data is used."
From The New York Times
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