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Date:  Tue, September 09, 2014
Time:  4:30 pm
Location:  Holmes Hall 244
Speaker:  Song Ci, Professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

With rapid development of mobile Internet, cloud computing and big data, ICT has become one of the fastest growing industrial sectors. However, behind the growth and prosperity of the ICT industry, we have seen a huge increase of energy consumption caused by the ICT industry. For example, the energy consumed by data centers worldwide in 2013 is equivalent to the total amount of energy generated by 30 nuclear power stations, and study shows the energy consumption of data centers in US will be doubled in every five years. Since most energy generated and consumed today is from fossil energy, the future ICT growth may cause not only greenhouse gas (GHG) and global warming, but also air pollution. Moreover, the mismatch between traditional ICT power supply and ICT load makes it even more challenging for sustainable ICT growth. This talk starts from how to solve the problems mentioned above by introducing a new concept of distributed energy management and control – the Energy Internet, for user-centric efficient renewable energy utilization outside the traditional boundary of power grid (or microgrid). The necessity of the Energy Internet will be discussed, and then the relationship between energy and information is deeply explored to understand the information characteristics of energy. Then, how to cloudify energy through developing a new suite of equipment - distributed energy storage and energy router will be discussed and further illustrated by a real world case study in data centers.

Bio: Prof. Song Ci received the B.S. degree from Shandong University in 1992, the M.S. degree from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2002, all in electrical engineering. Currently, he is an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His current research interests include large-scale dynamic complex system modeling and optimization, energy Internet and distributed energy management, green computing and communications, mobile Internet and cross-layer optimized content delivery. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed articles in these areas, and his research has been support by NSF and other funding sources. He has served as editor or guest editor in many journals such as IEEE Transactions on CSVT, IEEE JSAC, IEEE Access, and IEEE Wireless Network. He has also served in TPC of numerous international conferences. He is senior member of IEEE and member of ACM.