[Distinguished] Making Sense of Complex Energy Systems – AI-based Trust Assessment and Energy System Resilience
The digital transformation of energy systems creates unprecedented opportunities but also fundamentally changes the resilience challenges of critical infrastructure. The increasing integration of distributed renewable generation, digital automation, artificial intelligence, as well as interconnected cyber-physical components significantly increases both the operational complexity and the attack surface of modern power systems. This talk presents a trust-centric perspective on resilient system operation by extending traditional state estimation towards multidimensional trust assessment and introducing Adversarial Resilience Learning (ARL), an AI-based framework in which attacker and defender agents continuously learn within a shared digital twin of the system. The presentation discusses how trust-aware operational assessment and adversarial learning can reveal previously unknown vulnerabilities, support automated operational decision-making, and contribute to the design of energy systems that remain adaptive and resilient under evolving threats and uncertain operating conditions.
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Sebastian Lehnhoff
Date: 16 Jul 2026 (Tursday)
Time: 11:00am – 12:00nn
Venue: LI 3614
Poster: Click here
Biography
Sebastian Lehnhoff is a Full Professor of Energy Informatics at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. He serves as Chairman of the Board of the OFFIS Institute for Information Technology, and as Spokesperson of the Executive Board of the Energy Research Centre of Lower Saxony (EFZN). He is also executive board member of openKONSEQUENZ eG, a spin-off dedicated to open-source software development for the energy sector. He is a member of the Supervisory Boards of TÜV NORD Systems GmbH & Co. KG and KoCoS Messtechnik AG. He is a member of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW), as well as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation. And somehow, between all the management responsibilities, he still finds time for what he enjoys most: being curious, understanding complex systems, and shaping the future.