Saeed Lotfifard, Ph.D. - US grants

The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier (FW-HTF) is one of 10 new Big Ideas for Future Investment announced by the National Science Foundation. The FW-HTF cross-directorate program aims to respond to the challenges and opportunities of the changing landscape of jobs and work by supporting convergent research. This award fulfills part of that aim. Effective decision making by power grid operators in extreme events (e.g., Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the Ukraine cyber attack) depends on two factors: operator knowledge acquired through training and experience, and appropriate decision support tools. Decision making in electric grid operation during extreme adverse events directly impacts the life of citizens. This project will augment the cognitive performance of human operators with new, human-focused decision support tools and better, data-driven training for managing the grid especially under highly disruptive conditions. The development of new generation of tools for online knowledge fusion, event detection, cyber-physical-human analysis in operational environment can be applied during extreme events and provide energy to critical facilities like hospitals, city halls and essential infrastructure to keep citizens safe and avoid economic loss for the Nation. Higher performance of operators will improve worker quality of life and will enhance the economic and social well-being of the country. The project's training objectives will leverage existing educational efforts and outreach activities and we will publicize the multidisciplinary outcomes through multiple venues.


The proposed project will integrate principles from cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, cybersecurity, and power engineering to augment power grid operators for better performance. Two key parameters influencing human performance from the dynamic attentional control (DAC) framework are working memory (WM) capacity, the ability to maintain information in the focus of attention, and cognitive flexibility (CF), the ability to use feedback to redirect decision making given fast changing system scenarios. The project will achieve its goals through analyzing WM and CF and performance of power grid operators during extreme events; augmenting cognitive performance through advanced machine learning based decision support tools and adaptive human-machine system; and developing theory-driven training simulators for advancing cognitive performance of human operators for enhanced grid resilience. A new set of algorithms have been proposed for data-driven event detection, anomaly flag processing, root cause analysis and decision support using Tree Augmented naive Bayesian Net (TAN) structure, Minimum Weighted Spanning Tree (MWST) using the Mutual Information (MI) metric, and unsupervised learning improved for online learning and decision making. Additionally, visualization tools have been proposed using cognitive factor analysis and human error analysis. We propose a training process driven by cognitive and physiometric analysis and inspired by our experience in operators training in multiple domain: the power grid, aircraft and spacecraft flight simulators. A systematic approach for human operator decision making is proposed using quantifiable human and engineering analysis indices for power grid resiliency.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

With ever growing deployment of information and communication technologies in engineering systems online steaming of data becomes available. Online learning algorithms can utilize such high value data to enhance operation of national critical infrastructures such as power grids. Power distribution systems, unlike transmission power grids, lack extensive direct online measurement through sensing infrastructures. This makes an accurate monitoring of power distribution systems, which is crucial for reliable operation of the system, a challenging task, specifically in power distribution systems with massive integration of intermittent renewable energy sources that increase the variability of the aggregated load-generation values. The proposed research enables reliable monitoring of power distribution systems with massive integration of renewable energy which has economic and social impacts on the public. The proposed online optimization techniques, which will be investigated in this project, can be applied to a variety of learning tasks over data streams beyond power engineering. Research and teaching will be integrated through development of interdisciplinary educational modules on machine learning and smart power grids. The smart grid technologies will be promoted among high school seniors by defining and providing mentorship for projects that intersect power systems and computer science. Talented students from under-represented groups in STEM will be actively engaged in the project through the Washington State University and University of Iowa mentorship engineering programs.

Installing new sensors/meters at every node of the power distribution network, which may include thousands of nodes, is an expensive and a multi-year planning task. Also, the required sensors/meters redundancy for achieving reliable sensing platforms in facing possible failure or loss of sensors/meters cannot be fulfilled with such a scarce sensing infrastructure. Our proposed solution to this challenging real-world problem is analytical methodologies in the form of 'Virtual Meter'. The proposed "Virtual Meter" is not an actual physical device; rather it is a co-modeling paradigm that fuses data-driven and physics-based models in a closed loop setting with online bidirectional interactions. We propose a class of coherent, holistic, and feasible stream processing and online learning algorithms with provable quality guarantees and incur learning cost that enables such an online interaction, forging the co-modeling framework. First, we will create a class of ad-hoc data fusion algorithms that can exploit and extract reliable values from heterogeneous data streams. Second, the project will devise a class of online learning algorithms including online deep learning to estimate virtual measurements. The third major contribution of the project is that the proposed 'Virtual Meter' closes the loop of interactions between data-driven and physics-based models in an online setting creating a co-modeling framework to enhance the real-time monitoring of power distribution systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.