IEEE Toronto Newsletter- August 2025

The development of innovative cybersecurity technologies, tools, and methodologies that advance the energy system’s ability to survive cyber-attacks and incidents while sustaining critical functions is needed for the secure operation of utility and industrial systems. It is essential to verify and validate the ability of the developed solutions and methodologies so that they can be effectively used in practice. Developing solutions to mitigate cyber vulnerabilities throughout the energy delivery system is essential to protect hardware assets. It will also make systems less susceptible to cyber threats and provide reliable delivery of electricity if a cyber incident occurs. This talk will describe how the developed solution can protect the power grid and industrial infrastructure from cyber-attacks and build cybersecurity protection into emerging power grid components and services. This includes microgrid and demand-side management components and protecting the network (substations and productivity lines) and data infrastructure (SCADA) to increase the resilience of the energy delivery systems against cyber-attacks. These developments will also help utility security systems manage large amounts of cybersecurity risk data and cybersecurity operations. For these developments to succeed, cybersecurity testbeds and testing methodologies are necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of any proposed security technologies. The focus on developing cybersecurity capabilities in energy systems should span over multiple strategies: in the near term, midterm, and long term. Continuous security state monitoring across cyber-physical domains is the goal in the near term. The development of continually defending interoperable components that continue operating in degraded conditions is required in the midterm. Developing methodologies to mitigate cyber incidents to return to normal operations quickly is necessary for all system components in the long term. We will discuss R&D efforts in these areas centered on developing operational frameworks related to communication and interoperability, control, and protection. The importance of interoperability between smart grid applications and multi-vendor devices must be considered. The current grid comprises multi-vendor devices and multi-lingual applications that add to the complexity of integrating and securing the smart grid components. Standards development entities have been working with utilities, vendors, and regulatory bodies to develop standards that address smart grid interoperability. These include IEEE, IEC, NIST, ANSI, NERC, and others. In this presentation, we will conceptualize a comprehensive cyber-physical platform that involves the communication and power network sides integrating the cyber information flow, physical information flow, and the interaction between them. A data-centric communication middleware provides a common-data bus to orchestrate the system’s components, leading to an expandable multi-lingual system. We will present a hardware protocol gateway that was developed as a protocol translator capable of mapping IEC 61850 generic object-oriented substation event (GOOSE) and sampled measured value (SMV) messages into the data-centric Data Distribution Service (DDS) global data bus. This is necessary for integrating the widely used IEC 61850-based devices into an exhaustive microgrid control and security framework. We will also discuss a scalable cloud-based Multi-Agent System for controlling large-scale penetration of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and their infrastructure into the power grid. This is a system that can survive cyber-attacks while sustaining critical functions. This framework’s network will be assessed by applying contingencies and identifying the resulting signatures for detection in real-time operation. As a result, protective measures can be taken to address the dynamic threats in the foreseen grid-integrated EV parks where the developed system will have an automated response to a cyber-attack. In distributed energy management systems, the protection system must be adaptive. Communication networks assist in reacting to dynamic changes in the microgrid configurations. This presentation will also describe a newly developed protection scheme with extensive communication provided by the IEC 61850 standard for power networks to monitor the microgrid during these dynamic changes. The robustness and availability of the communication infrastructure are required for the success of protection measures. This adaptive protection scheme for AC microgrids can survive communication failures through energy storage systems. Co-sponsored by: Power Electronics/Industrial Electronics Speaker(s): Osama, Room: UA1140, Bldg: UA, 2000 Simcoe Street North, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, L1G7K4

[] Join the IEEE Toronto Instrumentation & Measurement – Robotics & Automation Joint Chapter for a technical talk presented by Dr. Roya Fallah Firoozi from University of Waterloo. Monday, August 11, 2025 @ 1:00 – 2:00 PM (EST) Abstract: As a robot manipulates 3D objects and navigates within 3D scenes, it requires spatial reasoning to ensure safe planning. Recent advances in 3D scene representation, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and Gaussian Splatting, provide high-fidelity digital twins of arbitrary real-world environments from multi-view images. In the first part of the talk, Dr. Firoozi will discuss employing these 3D visual fields augmented to 3D vision-language fields using internet-scale semantic representations from Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for open-vocabulary robot planning. As the robot interacts with other dynamic agents in the scene (multi-agent settings), it also requires temporal reasoning to ensure safe interactive planning. In the second part of the talk, Dr. Firoozi will discuss safe and fault-resilient planning techniques across two categories of interactive planning: (i) Model Predictive Control (MPC), where the prediction and planning steps are decoupled, and (ii) more abstract approaches such as game-theoretic planning, where these steps are tightly coupled. While MPC offers computational efficiency, game-theoretic planning enables more complex modeling of agents' preferences and their mutual influences. Speaker(s): Roya Fallah Firoozi, Ph.D., Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/487494

[] Join the IEEE Toronto Instrumentation & Measurement – Robotics & Automation Joint Chapter for a technical talk presented by Dr. Shideh Kabiri Ameri from Queen's University. Monday, July 21, 2025 @ 2:00 – 3:00 PM (EST) Abstract: Wearable devices for health monitoring are conveniently being miniaturized, their functionalities have been increased, and they are rapidly being integrated into our daily life. However, the current commercialized wearables are not mechanically compatible with soft, stretchable and dynamic skin which is normally the first point of contact to the body in wearables. This results not only in discomfort but also causes low fidelity and reliability during long term sensing. In this talk, Dr. Kabiri will discuss various novel approaches they have taken to address these issues. Their developed unconventional wearable devices for health monitoring have high sensing performance and low motion artifacts, and in some cases offer visual imperceptibility and non-intrusive sensing that satisfy the user’s privacy and mental comfort. Speaker(s): Shideh Kabiri Ameri, Ph.D., Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/486792