Advisors

Dr. Faruqui provides expert advice and testimony on rate design, load flexibility, energy efficiency, demand response,
distributed energy resources, demand forecasting, decarbonization, and electrification. He has worked for over 150 clients on five continents and appeared before regulatory bodies, governments, and legislative councils.

He has authored or coauthored more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed and trade journals and co-edited books on industrial structural change, customer choice, and electricity pricing. His work has been cited in Bloomberg, Business Week, The Economist, and Forbes, in addition to The New York Times and the Washington Post, and he has appeared on NPR and Fox Business News.

Dr. Faruqui has taught economics at San Jose State, UC Davis and the University of Karachi and delivered guest lectures at Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Idaho, MIT, New York, Northwestern, Rutgers, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. He obtained an MA in Agriculture Economics and a PhD in Economics from UC Davis, and a BA and an MA in Economics from the University of Karachi.

Greg is a Fellow at the Linux Foundation and is responsible for the Linux kernel stable releases. He is also the maintainer of a variety of different kernel subsystems (USB, char/misc, staging, etc.) and has written a few books about Linux kernel development.

Ibrahim Haddad (Ph.D.) is the Executive Director of the LF AI Foundation. Prior to the Linux Foundation, Haddad served as Vice President of R&D and Head of the Open Source Division at Samsung Electronics. Throughout his career, Haddad has held several technology and portfolio management roles at Ericsson Research, the Open Source Development Lab, Motorola, Palm and Hewlett-Packard. He graduated with Honors from Concordia University (Montréal, Canada) with a Ph.D. in Computer Science, where he was awarded the J. W. McConnell Memorial Graduate Fellowship and the Concordia University 25th Anniversary Fellowship.

Jono Bacon is a leading community and collaboration speaker, author, and podcaster. He is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting which provides community strategy/execution, workflow, and other services. He previously served as director of community at GitHub, Canonical, XPRIZE, and OpenAdvantage. His clients include Huawei, GitLab, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Sony Mobile, Deutsche Bank, Santander, HackerOne, Mattermost, SAP, FINOS Foundation, The Executive Center, data.world, Creative Commons, and others.

Lorenzo Kristov is an independent consultant working on electric power system reform to integrate high levels of renewable generation and distribution-connected energy resources (DER). 21^st-century environmental policy goals combined with rapidly evolving energy technologies and business models require a whole-system perspective that encompasses regulatory frameworks, market structures, grid operations and infrastructure planning. With 18 years of experience as a Principal in market design and infrastructure policy at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), Lorenzo’s areas of expertise include: wholesale power market design; DER participation in wholesale markets; coordination of transmission and distribution operations, markets and planning; distribution system operator (DSO) models; distribution-level markets; local energy resilience and microgrids; and whole-system grid architecture.

While at CAISO from 1999 through 2017 Lorenzo led cross-functional teams and stakeholder initiatives to enhance CAISO’s market and planning functions and to better integrate markets with grid operations. He was a lead designer of the CAISO locational marginal pricing (LMP) market system implemented in 2009. He later led teams to redesign transmission planning and generator interconnection processes to accommodate rapid growth of renewable energy projects. In 2013 he began working to integrate DERs into the CAISO market and to develop procedures for transmission-distribution (TSO-DSO) interface coordination. He has written widely cited papers, consulted with international clients and participated in national and international forums on power system evolution, DSO models and grid architecture.

Prior to joining the CAISO Lorenzo was Energy Economist at the California Energy Commission (1995-9) and Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia (1993-4). He has a BS in Mathematics from Manhattan College, MS in Statistics from North Carolina State University, and PhD in Economics from University of California Davis.

Lorraine H. Akiba is President/CEO of LHA Ventures. She is a recognized thought leader with technical expertise and knowledge in the development of Hawaii’s renewable and clean energy policy and regulatory framework. Given her diverse professional experience she provides senior policy advisor services in other regulated industry sectors and expertise for development of corporate environmental, social and governance goals and metrics for publicly traded companies.

She served as a commissioner on the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission which presides over all regulated public utility matters including electric, gas, private water and wastewater, telecommunications, water transportation and motor carrier transportation utilities.

Prior to this appointment, she worked in private practice as a law partner at McCorriston Miller Mukai MacKinnon LLP and Cades Schutte LLP. She headed the Environmental Practice Groups at both law firms with an emphasis in environmental and natural resources law in addition to her commercial and business litigation practice.

She continues many leadership roles in various national and international organizations including the City and County of Honolulu Resilience Strategy Steering Committee, the Interstate Renewable Energy Council Board of Directors and the US-Japan Council. She also is a member of the O-Power Industry Council and the U.S. DOE Research Advisory Council for the LIFT Solar project.

Ms. Akiba previously served as member of the Advisory Council to the Board of Directors of the Electric Power Research Institute; the Board of Directors of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and its Energy Resources and Environment Committee; the U.S. DOE and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Future Electric Utility Regulation Advisory Group and the State and Local Efficiency Action Network (SEE Network) Financial Solutions Working Group.
Ms. Akiba holds a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law and graduated with honors from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in political science.

Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She holds degrees in quantitative social science and has been a practicing data scientist and AI developer since 2013. She is currently the Global Lead for Responsible AI at Accenture Applied Intelligence, where she works with C-suite clients to create cutting-edge technical solutions for ethical, explainable and transparent AI.