Distributed Energy Resources are being progressively adopted by consumers and are significantly changing how we monitor and optimize power distribution networks. Some major challenges are learning accurate models of distribution networks to incorporate in system management, optimizing resource coordination under realistic data ownership and communication constraints or in a model-free manner and deciding where to place resources under realistic system models. In this talk, we introduce various formulations inspired by practical applications and real data and review algorithms that address them.  We list various open algorithm design and performance analysis questions related to these problems.