We are among the five finalists for the Houska Prize 2020. This year, the community can give their votes for the five remaining candidates.

Please support us with your vote here: https://bcgruppe.at/houskapreis/voting/

Günther Eibl, Andreas Unterweger and Fabian Knirsch were invited to the 2018 Lorentz Workshop on InVivo Software Analytics in Leiden, The Netherlands.
The scope of this workshop included software testing, requirements engineering and blockchains. Researchers from different fields collaborated and worked in break-out sessions on future topics for research that spans multiple domains.
Andreas Unterweger and Fabian Knirsch from the Center for Secure Energy Informatics presented their latest research on Privacy-Preserving Operation of Blockchain Technology in the Smart Grid User Domain. The talk presented teir work on privacy-preserving tariff matching protocols, privacy-preserving EV charging and the blockchain implementation for sharing portions of energy generated from photo voltaic power plants in residential households. Fruitful discussions emerged from the cross-domain knowledge transfer.
The Lorentz Center in Leiden (http://www.lorentzcenter.nl) hosts international workshops after a rigorous review of proposals in a scientific committee. Workshop proposals should foster new collaborations in otherwise diverse groups of researchers.

Twitter stream:
https://twitter.com/hashtag/bigsoftware

The University of Porto, home of the celebrated Port Wine, hosted the 16th International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN`2018). International researchers, academics and practitioners presented their work related to industrial informatics and their applications. The Special Session Advanced ICT and Control Approaches for Intelligent Energy Systems was a good opportunity for Judith Schwarzer to show her Conceptual Design of an Agent-based Socio-technical Demand Response Consumer Model.

For more details, see:

• J. Schwarzer, D. Engel, and S. Lehnhoff, “Conceptual Design of an Agent-based Socio-technical Demand Response Consumer Model,” in International Conference on Industrial Informatics, Porto, Portugal, 2018, pp. 680-685.
  [Bibtex]

  @inproceedings{Schwarzer18a,
  address = {Porto, Portugal},
  author = {Schwarzer, Judith and Engel, Dominik and Lehnhoff, Sebastian},
  booktitle = {{International Conference on Industrial Informatics}},
  month = {7},
  publisher = {{IEEE}},
  pages = {680-685},
  keywords = {demand response;user model;structural agent analysis;agent based simulation},
  doi = {10.1109/INDIN.2018.8472021},
  ISSN = {2378-363X},
  title = {Conceptual Design of an Agent-based Socio-technical Demand Response Consumer Model},
  year = {2018},
  pdf = {http://www.en-trust.at/papers/Schwarzer18a.pdf},
  }

Today, Fabian Knirsch successfully defended his thesis at the University of Salzburg. Congratulation, Dr. Knirsch!

Two of our Master students are currently writing their Master’s Theses at the University of Southern California in LA. Together with our colleagues from USC, Eva is working on demand forecasting with machine learning and Stefan is working on intrusion detection for smart energy grids.

The researchers Clemens Brunner, Fabian Knirsch and Andreas Unterweger
from the Center for Secure Energy Informatics are currently attending
the 5th Summer School on real-world crypto and privacy in Šibenik (Croatia).

International researchers from the fields of privacy and security give
talks, both on introductory and current topics in cryptography. The
first session, chaired by Joan Daemen, known for his contribution to the
widely used Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and the SHA-3 hash
function, gave an overview of symmetric cryptography.

Further topics were asymmetric cryptography and hardware security, which
has many applications in the field of Energy Informatics. The remaining
talks until Friday will cover state-of-the-art topics and advances in
fields like privacy and distributed ledgers.

from left to right: Clemens Brunner, Joan Daemen, Andreas Unterweger, Fabian Knirsch

Our project with Salzburg AG and Verbund, using blockchain technology for distributing solar power among tenants, is featured in one of the latest EURELECTRIC reports:
https://cdn.eurelectric.org/media/3111/paper1_blockchain_eurelectric-h-DE808259.pdf

We are happy to welcome Clemens Brunner to our team. Clemens will support us in our projects using blockchain technology in the energy domain.

The masterplan for ICT in Salzburg was presented at the European Forum in Alpbach on August 25, 2017. We are excited that Energy Informatics is part of the strategy for future ICT in Salzburg.

Dominik Engel presented the vision of the Center for Secure Energy Informatics to be established in Salzburg.

For more information see https://www.itg-salzburg.at/topics/salzburger-wissenschaftstreff-in-alpbach-2/?lang=DE (in German).

Presentation of Energy Informatics as a focus field in the future of Salzburg’s ICT strategy: the Governor of Salzburg, Wilfried Haslauer, Environmental Secretary Martina Berthold and Head of Center Dominik Engel. (c) ITG/Zinner

Today, Christian Neureiter has successfully defended his PhD thesis on “A Domain-Specific, Model Driven Engineering Approach for Systems Engineering in the Smart Grid” at the University of Oldenburg. Congratulations, Dr. Neureiter!