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About me

Xiang Huo received the B.S. degree in Automation and the M.S. degree in Control Science and Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China, in 2017 and 2019, respectively. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Utah at the University of Utah in 2024, supervised by Prof. Mingxi Liu. Currently, he is a Postdoc affiliated with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, working with Prof. Katherine Davis. During summer 2022, he was a research intern at the Grid Interactive Controls Group, Oak Ridge National Laboratory mentored by Dr. Jamie Lian and Dr. Jin Dong, working on the decentralized control of grid-interactive buildings. His research interests include multi-agent optimization, reinforcement learning, privacy and security in power and cyber-physical systems. His research is supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

My research

The rapidly growing penetration of distributed renewable energy resources brings unprecedented challenges to power distribution networks — management of a large population of grid-tied controllable devices encounters control scalability crisis and potential end-user privacy breaches (as shown in Fig. 1). Despite the importance, research on privacy preservation of distributed energy resource control in a fully scalable manner is lacked.

Fig. 1: Scalability and privacy urges in distribution network

Dedicated to promoting the future smart grid towards decentralization, decarbonization, and security, I am researching on new distributed and decentralized algorithms to address scalability and privacy in large-scale cooperative multi-agent optimizations. This research exploits the increased penetration of distributed energy resources, such as solar photovoltaics (PVs), energy storage systems (ESSs), and electric vehicles (EVs), to provide grid-edge services. Privacy-preserving strategies are developed simultaneously to protect participants’ private information.

News

• Paper accepted for CDC2023! Our recent paper titled “On privacy preservation of electric vehicle charging control via state obfuscation,” will be presented at the CDC 2023 | Dec. 13 – Dec. 15 | Singapore!
• Our proposal wins the Runner-Up of the Wilkes Center Student Innovation Prize (10K), titled “Decarbonize the Diné: A Prefabricated Solar-Driven Communal Solution with Passive Survivability,” at the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy!
• Incoming presentation at PES2023! A poster regarding “Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Distributed Energy Resource Control Over Cloud-Edge Computing” at the PES 2023 | July 16 – July 20 | Orlando, Florida.
• Incoming presentation at ACC23! The previous published article “Two-Level Decentralized-Centralized Control of Distributed Energy Resources in Grid‐Interactive Efficient Buildings.” will be presented at the ACC 2023 | May 31 – June 2 | San Diego.
• New paper! Available at “Privacy-Preserving Distributed Energy Resource Control with Decentralized Cloud Computing,” arXiv.
• So happy to be a Research Intern at Grid Interactive Controls Group, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a wonderful experience! Jun. 2022 – Sept. 2022.