Pittsburgh TechFest 2026

As extreme weather, wildfire risks, aging infrastructure, and growing electricity demand place new pressure on the power grid, utilities and communities need better tools for resilient decision-making. In this talk, I will discuss how human-AI collaboration can support grid infrastructure planning and operations by combining data-driven prediction, uncertainty quantification, and optimization with human expertise. Drawing on recent research in outage analytics, distributed energy adoption, wildfire risk, and grid resilience, I will show how AI can help decision-makers anticipate infrastructure vulnerabilities, evaluate tradeoffs, and respond more effectively under uncertainty. The talk will emphasize a practical question: how do we design AI systems that do not replace human judgment, but instead make expert decisions more reliable, transparent, and scalable?