Data driven decision making

Demystifying, Defining, and Developing the Metaverse Abstract: Metaverse has become a widely discussed and quoted term capturing more and more attention. There are different metaverses in the eyes of different people, but it is generally agreed that metaverse will have a profound impact on our daily work, play, and life, across all industries and sectors, reshaping the economy and society for all humankind. This talk will define metaverse in an inclusive way considering the origin and the latest developments and provide an overview of the metaverse technology landscape and outlook.

09:00 am PST Malik Ishak, 'Wireless Fiber Grids through Lighting for Smart City Broadband and IOT', Director, Smart City Connectivity "Brining Gigabit Speed Connectivity to the street level" How cities and utilities can quickly, and cost effectively deploy gigabit speed networks using existing assets to help close the connectivity gap and prepare for the next generation of high bandwidth smart city applications.

Malik Ishak
Bio Director of Smart City Connectivity, North America Signify (BrightSites) Malik Ishak serves as Director of Smart City Connectivity for the North America within Signify's BrightSites business unit. Mr. Ishak possesses over 20 years of telecoms experience (gained both nationally and internationally) from his tenure with multinationals including Sprint, Andrew Corporation and CommScope where he took new and innovative telecom solutions to market and led teams globally. Since joining Signify in January 2021 Mr. Ishak secured the first North American deployment of the BrightSites innovative last mile Broadband Luminaire solution (at the VA Smart Community Testbed in Stafford County). Mr. Ishak is working with municipalities, utilities, neutral hosts, MNOs, ISPs and IOT applications layer providers to support the deployment of Smart City solutions throughout North America.
Please Welcome… https://www.linkedin.com/in/maliktech/ 09:25 am PST Máire Sogabe, Cybersecurity & Compliance, Generate Capital, Risk Manager The energy network is transforming. Change is happening rapidly across all sectors. The grid is becoming more intelligent, sophisticated, digitized, and connected. Energy resources are more diverse and distributed. The geopolitical order is changing as we move away from fossil fuels to other sources of energy. There are more bad actors, more capabilities, and greater connectivity. All of these changes drive a need to rethink and refocus our cybersecurity strategy to drive resiliency.
Máire will discuss how important it is to plan for these changes and build cybersecurity programs that are sustainable and resilient.

Máire Sogabe
Key considerations include: -understanding the risk -what are you trying to protect and from whom?; -building a culture of security; -designing with security in mind; and, -navigating the regulatory environment.

Bio
Ms. Sogabe is a cyber security leader with extensive experience securing IT & OT environments. At Generate, she leads Security & Compliance where she is building a security program that proactively manages risk, ensures compliance, and adapts to evolving threats.
Generate is a dedicated sustainable infrastructure platform. Generate builds, owns, operates, and finances affordable and reliable infrastructure solutions for clean energy, waste, water, transportation,, and smart cities infra techs. We partner with 50+ project developers and tech companies to build more than 2000 assets.
Prior to joining Generate, Máire worked as a Cyber Security Consultant at Engie where she worked on aligning the IT digital security program to the NIST CyberSecurity Framework to ensure their IT and OT assets across North America were secure and resilient. Prior to Engie, she worked at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) where she managed strategic initiatives to protect PG&E's critical infrastructure, information assets, and business operations for the Chief Security Officer. While at PG&E, she also implemented complex technology solutions for the electric, gas, and nuclear business to advance digital transformation, and enable next generation energy management and the Grid of Things. She managed one of the largest, most complex Utility GIS implementations in North America.
She is a two-time energy hackathon winner. She was recognized as one of the "Silicon Valley 50" by the Irish Technology Leadership group for her leadership in technology. He will speak about Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) and why it is the future for data access management. He will provide an example of a large sophisticated RBAC system he built at a previous company and how ABAC could have saved him so much time and money.

Máire is an "In
Okera's president has previously marketed in the AMI space.

Darrell Ross
Bio General-purpose computation has improved the lives of billions around the globe. Critical infrastructures, to include the power grid, nuclear power plants, and manufacturing depend upon the ubiquitous use of networked computerized devices. Due to the commodity components used in their design, these devices have excess capabilities and processing capacity that provide a larger attack surface. To reduce this attack surface, the author describes a prototype of a hardware-only controller, a deterministic system, that performs its intended function, and nothing else. In other words, because it contains no software, it cannot be reprogrammed. The paper posits this device as a viable

Perry Pederson
replacement for software programmable controllers and describes future research paths.

Bio
Mr. Pederson is a strategic thinker in technology R&D and cyber security spanning 40 years in the public and private sectors. He has worked for agencies such as the DoD, DHS, DOE, and the NRC where he helped shape the regulatory framework for cyber security. Most notably as the Director for the Control Systems Security Program at DHS, he managed the Aurora project where a major vulnerability to rotating equipment (e.g., diesel generators) was demonstrated at Idaho National Lab.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/perrypederson/ 10:40 am PST James Kempf, 'Blockchain Transactive Energy and the Electric Grid', Kempf and Associates Transactive energy was originally proposed as an alternative to the traditional optimal control-based mechanisms for balancing supply and demand in the grid. The proposal was based on a grid architecture scenario where the grid becomes more and more decentralized, with hundreds of thousands of DERs and millions of flexible loads, making the solution of the optimal control problem increasingly intractable. Market-mechanisms such as transactive energy have been successful in many areas in balancing supply and demand, and market-mechanisms have been a pillar of the wholesale power market since the 1990s. While the original concept was premised on using a centralized database, decentralized ledgers such as blockchains provide an even better base, since they can accommodate additional participants in the business ecosystem such as aggregators while James Kempf building trust between the ecosystem participants. In addition, they can be deployed in a decentralized fashion down to a single building or small community solar deployment, a deployment architecture that is well-suited to the decentralized nature of DERs and flexible loads. In this talk, we'll briefly review the history of transactive energy (BCTE), discuss the three basic technologies underlying blockchain, distributed ledgers, and tokens, and then explore some BCTE use cases that are being or could be deployed today and some examples of organizations deploying BCTE solutions.
In this talk, we'll briefly review the three drivers of grid modernization, review transactive energy and how blockchain can be used to implement transactive systems, explore a few blockchain transactive energy use cases, and look at a few blockchain transactive energy pilots and projects currently ongoing. In this talk, the speaker shall provide a high-level overview of the current scope of application of machine learning in healthcare. He shall also delve into a more specific context of signal processing and machine learning algorithms in wearable devices and personal health tracking. Ways to harness and leverage the huge amount of digital clinical data shall be explored. The speaker shall also discuss the current challenges faced by the growth of machine learning in this domain. Finally, potential solutions, advancements and open areas for further research and development shall be highlighted.

Bio
Abhishek Bafna is a machine learning scientist at Amazon working in the space of biometric-based algorithms for wearable devices. He has background in signal and image processing focused on medical imaging and clinical healthcare. He has developed algorithms in multiple modalities including ultrasound imaging, automated analysis of 2D/3D CT/MRI images and angiograms to detect affected tissue areas and lesions. He has also developed NLP based healthcare applications effective in predicting adverse patient conditions by leveraging unstructured text data. A convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict the analytical concentration of COVID-19 spiked into at-home rapid diagnostic devices using images captured from common smartphones. The CNN built using PyTorch and over 2,000 images which were taken at a range of angles and lighting conditions to add real-world complexity. The initial format of the network produced a classification output, but the better results came from reformulating the problem as a regression model.

Daniel Leon Bio
Applied Mathematician: developing data-driven models to provide insight informing improved outcomes; using both traditional statistical methods and the latest in machine & deep learning techniques, combined with an understanding of computer architecture that allows me to utilize the high-performance computing (HPC) toolkit.
• Experienced project lead in multidisciplinary R&D lab developing consumer-ready diagnostic devices on multi-million-dollar NSF and NIH funded research projects.
• Over 10 years of experience with experimental design, hypotheses testing, causal inferencing. • Resourceful and highly motivated problem solver and life-long learner with strong communication skills. OT SOC as a Service -Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure. SOC as a Service approach for Cyber Secure Substations. Information about cyber-attack vectors within a substation environment and means to address these threats. Information about a Siemens mature technology that provides Intrusion Detection System and Advanced Firewall Protection utilizing third-party partner solutions to combat cyberattacks. Additionally, information on how SOCaaS helps utilities achieve NERC CIP Compliance and can reduce O&M costs.

Gerry Vurciaga
Mr. Vurciaga is a Business Innovations Director.
As an industry veteran, he embarked on creating an "Energy Opus." The time was ripe to leverage his knowledge, capabilities, and industry relationships to make his contributions as a citizen of this planet. He is passionate that one person can make a difference and with his friends, colleagues, and collaborators his "Energy Opus" will provide sustainable solutions for Utilities, Have you ever wondered how the evolution of the monetization of cybercrime came about? For many companies, the answer is no. Decisionmakers buy into the idea that disaster recovery solutions are expensive, inconvenient and require a lot of internal resources and expertise -and risk remains high. We look at current trends, data to back up our quotes, and offer what other competitors don't. We make it easy and educate the customers. Learn to market current trends and stand out above the rest.

Erin Pak
Bio Digital Marketing manager for Flexential. Erin Pak is a marketing guru who believes in disrupting the orthodox of marketing. She excels in creating brand awareness, creating engagement, and leveraging changes to make brands stand out. Erin brings over 15 years of transforming marketing experience and began her career at the start of the e-commerce era. Her keen sense of all-encompassing marketing plans enables her to compassionately understand the goals and wants of a B2B world. Erin is currently overseeing Demand Gen at Flexential where she created FlexTalk, a tech-based fireside chat discussing solutions with industry experts, customers, and partners. You can catch her OnDemand FlexTalk episodes here. Marketing Approach to Cyber Security Have you ever wondered how the evolution of the monetization of cybercrime came about? For many companies, the answer is no. Decision-makers buy into the idea that disaster recovery solutions are expensive, inconvenient and require a lot of internal resources and expertise -and risk remains high. We look at current trends, data to back up our quotes, and offer what other competitors don't. We make it easy and educate the customers. Learn to market current trends and stand out above the rest.