The IEEE PowerTech 2019 conference coincided with the summer 2019 European heat wave. Multiple countries got affected by the hot weather, which killed hundreds of people and disturbed the operation of power systems. During the conference, it was hard to walk in Milan. The temperature reached around 40°C. This was another sign to the research community that we have no choice but to develop sustainable energy systems.
Here is an illustrative map from Wikipedia:
The conference was an important event for power systems research communities and industry. My scientific advisors and co-authors, as well as other high-caliber scientists, came to Italy to present their recent studies and ideas. It was great to participate in many scientific discussions and friendly meetings. Such events give an opportunity of not only practicing your presentation skills but, most importantly, learning to listen and comprehend the ideas of others.
However, I want to add a drop of poison to this post since I was disappointed by the IEEE PowerTech conference arrangements. I have a feeling that the conference transformed into a business model with the goal of accepting as many people as possible and earning more money. That’s why this year, PowerTech accepted more than 700 speakers. It was impossible to let all the people make presentations during the four days of the conference. Therefore, PowerTech decided to arrange a series of poster sessions instead of presentations. Unfortunately, my talk was scheduled for a poster session. And I had no chance to change this decision or complain. So, I closed my PowerPoint, opened CorelDRAW, and developed a poster.
I created an unusual design exploiting the geometry of the Core of the cooperative game for the Northeast Asia case study. By the way, the poster sessions were short and noisy. So, instead of photos, I would better place my poster here.
The main idea of our study was to demonstrate the manipulability issues of allocation rules that could take place in transmission expansion planning. The conference paper is available at IEEEXplore:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8810685
Despite the heat wave and the conference schedule, I had a chance to walk in Milan and even take a short trip to Verona.
Some magnificent photos of Milan:
And Verona:
By the way, I recommend everyone to visit Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Milan. I have never seen such a coffee house before. It looks like a magic factory:
Finally, I leave here several cars that I saw on Italian streets:
Andrey Churkin (Андрей Чуркин) 2019
