Received in 2018, the second travel grant for workshop participants was a supplemental funding to the Smart Grids Big Data Spoke project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant in the amount of $49,975 was given to reduce expenses of recipients, such as registration fee, airfare, and meals. The goal was to attract more participants from underrepresented groups, such as women, persons with disabilities, and divers racial/ethnic groups. Moreover, attracting young faculty with interest in Big Data was also in the focus to help them engage in data sharing and collaboration in applying Big Data analytics for advancing Smart Grids. International partners were also invited to apply for this grant from various academic institutions performing BD research. The Principal Investigator (PI) of the project is Dr. Mladen Kezunovic (ECE), and Co-PIs from TAMU are Dr. P.R. Kumar and Dr. Le Xie (ECE), and Dr. Dilma Da Silva (CSE).
The first workshop held in College Station, Texas, on April 18-19, 2017 was very successful, which is judged based on the number of participants, their profiles, and contributions to the discussions. The travel grant for the last year’s workshop supported 26 participants, which included 15 young faculty, researchers, and postdocs, 9 graduate students. Among those, 7 were foreign visitors from UK, Singapore, Croatia, and Brazil, and 6 were females.
The second workshop was also held in College Station, Texas, on May 8, 2018 with 141 participants. The travel grant defrayed costs of 38 travel grant recipients including 15 young faculty, researchers, and postdocs, 14 graduate students including 3 females. Among the recipients were 14 foreign visitors from UK, Brazil, and India.
Both workshops provided ample opportunities for developing relationships for future team building capabilities to bid joint proposals, sharing open source solutions for Big Data uses (applications) in the smart grids, and contributing to the smart grid Big Data research roadmap, as well as engaging in developing relevant education courses.