Shenoy Named Founding Chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Energy

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Prashant Shenoy, a Distinguished Professor and associate dean in the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at UMass Amherst, has been named the founding chair of the new Special Interest Group on Energy (SIGENERGY) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

ACM SIGENERGY will bring together researchers from a variety of computing disciplines to address the challenges associated with future energy systems and their impact on society. The initial activities of the special interest group will include organizing two annual conferences, promoting workshops with an energy focus, and developing a model curriculum in energy informatics.

“We envision SIGENERGY as an interdisciplinary forum for researchers and practitioners who use computational methods and technologies to help decarbonize our society,” explains Shenoy. “In the face of a global climate crisis, we urgently need to work together towards revolutionary, carbon-free systems of energy generation and consumption.”

For over a decade, Shenoy and his group at Laboratory for Advanced Software Systems have conducted research in energy informatics, applying computing and AI methods to enhance energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. This research has won numerous awards at ACM e-Energy and BuildSys, SIGENERGY’s two major research conferences in the field.

Within SIGENERGY, Shenoy will be working with longtime collaborator David Irwin, now an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst, along with colleagues from the University of Cambridge, University of Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Oldenburg and IBM Research. The group’s founding members have research backgrounds in areas such as energy informatics and energy system design, renewable energy modeling and integration, energy storage systems, electric vehicles and data center energy management.

Prior to the formation of SIGENERGY, Shenoy served as chair of the ACM’s emerging interest group on energy since 2018. At UMass, Shenoy also directs the Center for Smart and Connected Society, which conducts interdisciplinary research into smart and connected technologies for societal good.

Shenoy is currently on a 2020–21 Conti Fellowship from UMass Amherst to further his research, after having been appointed a distinguished professor by the university in 2020. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2019, an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow in 2018, an IEEE Fellow in 2017, and a Fulbright Specialist Scholar in 2017. He has been on the UMass faculty since 1998.