IEEE PowerTech 2023 conference, Belgrade

PowerTech 2023 was the second PowerTech conference that I have participated in. Compared to the previous PowerTech 2019, I was happy to see major improvements in the conference. The venue, Crowne Plaza Belgrade, was nice and spacious, with plenty of well-equipped rooms. Most importantly, the poster sessions have been fixed – no more noisy overcrowded poster spaces. Many thanks to the organisers for this! Of course, the main strength of the conference was the people. Many leading power system engineers and researchers (accompanied by their brilliant students) joined the event to present their studies. For me it was a great pleasure to meet my Ph.D. advisors, Prof. Janusz Bialek and Dr. David Pozo, whom I had not seen for more than three years. I also had a chance to chat with most of my colleagues from the European Horizon research project. Overall, PowerTech provided a great networking opportunity, and my stay in Belgrade was very interesting and eventful.

One of the stories I would like to share here is about my presentations. Two of my papers were accepted at PowerTech, so I had to give two 15-minute presentations, one talk per study. As is usually the case for academics, I was extremely busy with other work and travelling before the conference. So I arrived in Belgrade without any slides or a speech prepared. That was obviously not great by me. Over the next few days, I was preparing slides at night since the days were busy with sessions and meetings. It was quite risky, especially since I had two talks in one session with no time to rest/prepare in between. What a relief it was when I presented the studies and received positive feedback from the audience! I checked the video and was happy to see that my presentations were clear and consistent. The moral here could be, “Do not come to conferences unprepared, but everything is possible.” The videos are now available on YouTube: