Powerful Protection Working to improve the efficiency, resiliency
Javad Lavaei, Ph.D. Associate Professor Industrial Engineering and Operation Research UC Berkeley
and sustainability of power systems
By Sarah Colwell
Somayeh Sojoudi, Ph.D. Associate Professor Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences UC Berkeley
CYBERSECURITY AND PRIVACY
To this day, the Camp Fire of 2018 is the largest wildfire in the history of California, having destroyed more than 18,000 structures, caused billions of dollars in damage and reduced the entire town of Paradise to ashes. On the other side of the country, the Manhattan blackout of 2019 plunged over 70,000 residents into darkness, disrupting public transportation and putting the most densely populated borough of the largest city in the U.S. into chaos. These disasters, though different in nature, expose the same underlying issue: the vulnerability of our power infrastructure, says UC Noyce researcher Javad Lavaei, Ph.D. “Both of these events could have been avoided if the operators had access to better data analysis and learning tools for anomaly detection,” he said. “Our research has led to the development of a deep learning technique capable of detecting anomalies, as well as an machine learning (ML)-based method for identifying the most vulnerable areas of the U.S. power grid.” Lavaei is an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s department of industrial engineering and operations research, and a nationally recognized expert in control theory, optimization and power systems. With funding from UCNI, Lavaei and fellow UC Berkeley Associate Professor Somayeh Sojoudi, Ph.D., are working together to leverage cutting-edge ML and artificial intelligence (AI) to fortify the U.S. power grid against cyber threats.
58 Impact Report 2023 - 24 | UC NI
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