**Zita Vale**

Prof. Zita Vale is Principal Coordinator Professor at the School of Engineering (ISEP) of the Polytechnic of Porto (IPP) and Director of GECAD Research Group on Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Developments. She is also member of LASI—Associate Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, where she chairs the line on "Smart cities, mobility and energy", one of the five LASI research lines. Her main interests regard the application of artificial intelligence techniques to power systems, including knowledge-based systems, multi-agent systems, neural networks, meta-heuristics, optimization, machine learning, and knowledge discovery techniques. She has been involved in more than 60 R&D projects, of which she coordinated more than 30 projects. The main application fields of these projects are smart grids, with intensive use of renewable energy sources, distributed energy resources and distributed generation; addressing the management of energy resources; the negotiation of DER in electricity markets, demand response, and electric vehicles; electricity markets, addressing prices and tariffs; and decision support for market participants, ancillary services, derivatives market, pricing, and market simulation. She has published over 900 works, including more than 180 papers in international scientific journals. She has been contributing to renowned international conferences as a program committee member, program chair, reviewer, and by organizing special and panel sessions. She has also been a keynote speaker at several conferences and guest editor and/or editorial board member of scientific international journals. She also contributes to several scientific and technical committees and working groups. Currently, she chairs the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Power and Energy Society (PES) Working Group on Data Analysis and Mining and Task Force on Open Data Sets.
