Congratulations to Duke Math faculty member Cynthia Rudin on being awarded a 2020-2021 Energy Research Seed Fund grant. This year the Duke University Energy Initiative program awarded six grants to projects involving 13 faculty from five Duke schools, investing a total of $249,590 in promising new energy research. The program has a strong track record of investing in early-stage projects that go on to secure substantial external funding.
Professor Rudin is working with Sudeepa Roy (Computer Science) and Alexander Volfovsky (Statistical Science). Their project, "Enabling Better Energy Decisions Through Better Interpretable Causal Inference" is described below.
As power grids age, demand grows, and power becomes less reliable, power companies must adapt legacy grids and create new programs to cope with changing times. But those companies are currently struggling to determine what types of changes will produce their desired outcomes. This project builds on a previous seed grant to combine causal inference methods with ideas from machine learning to produce an approach for matching in causal inference that is substantially more accurate, interpretative, and scalable than any other method.
Learn more: http://bit.ly/seedfund2020.
