SIGEnergy Rising Star Award 2024 Winner

SIGEnergy establishes an annual Rising Star Award to recognize a young researcher who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of energy systems and informatics.

For the 2024 cohort, the award committee has chosen Omid Ardakanian from University of Alberta, as the SIGEnergy Rising Star Award winner, for the following citation:

for contributions to data-enabled optimization and learning-based control of smart grid, buildings, and energy systems.

Omid Ardakanian is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He received the BSc in Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, and the MMath and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of S. Keshav and Catherine Rosenberg. He was nominated for the Governor General’s Gold Medal for his PhD thesis. Before joining the University of Alberta, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley (advised by David Culler), and the University of British Columbia (advised by Vincent Wong). 

His research focuses on designing algorithms for safe, stable, and efficient operation of networked, embedded, and cyber-physical systems. He currently serves as Treasurer for ACM SIGENERGY and on the steering committee of ACM e-Energy. He is also an editor of Energy Informatics Review (EIR). In the past, he served as a guest editor of IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and a TPC co-chair of ACM e-Energy 2021. 

He won the 2024 ACM e-Energy Test of Time Award for his research that also received the Best Paper Award at the Fourth International Conference on Future Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy) in 2013. He also received the best paper award at ACM BuildSys 2016 and 2022, and IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting 2017.

Omid will receive the award at ACM e-Energy 2024, June 4-7, 2024, Singapore.