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Human-Building Interaction (HBI) is a convergent field that represents the growing complexities of the dynamic interplay between human experience and intelligence within built environments. This paper provides core definitions, research dimensions, and an overall vision for the future of HBI as developed through consensus among 25 interdisciplinary experts in a series of facilitated workshops. Three primary areas contribute to and require attention in HBI research: humans (human experiences, performance, and well-being), buildings (building design and operations), and technologies (sensing, inference, and awareness). Three critical interdisciplinary research domains intersect these areas: control systems and decision making, trust and collaboration, and modeling and simulation. Finally, at the core, it is vital for HBI research to center on and support equity, privacy, and sustainability. Compelling research questions are posed for each primary area, research domain, and core principle. State-of-the-art methods used in HBI studies are discussed, and examples of original research are offered to illustrate opportunities for the advancement of HBI research.

 

Time-series data gathered from smart spaces hide user's personal information that may arise privacy concerns. However, these data are needed to enable desired services. In this paper, we propose a privacy preserving framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) that supports sensor-based applications while preserving the user identity. Experiments with two datasets show that the proposed model can reduce the inference of the user's identity while inferring the occupancy with a high level of accuracy. 

This project seeks to investigate the under addressed issue of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and the impacts these factors can have on human health. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has once again brought to the forefront the importance of maintaining a healthy indoor environment. Specifically, the improvement of indoor air flow has shown to reduce the risk of airborne virus exposure. This is extremely important in the context of hospitals, which contain high concentrations of atrisk individuals. Thus, the need to create a healthy indoor space is critical to improve public health and COVID-19 mitigation efforts. To create knowledge and provide insight on environmental qualities in the hospital setting, the authors have designed and built an interface to deploy in the University of Virginia Hospital Emergency Department (ED). The interface will display room-specific light, noise, temperature, CO 2 , humidity, VOC, and PM 2.5 levels measured by the low-cost Awair Omni sensor. These insights will assist ED clinicians in mitigating disease-spread and improving patient health and satisfaction while reducing caregiver burden. The team addressed the problem through agile development involving localized sensor deployment and analysis, discovery interviews with hospital clinicians and data scientists throughout, and the implementation of a human-design centered Django interface application. Furthermore, a literature survey was conducted to ascertain appropriate thresholds for the different environmental factors. Together, this work demonstrates opportunities to assist and improve patient care with environmental data. 

As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices continues to increase, energy-harvesting (EH) devices eliminate the need to replace batteries or find outlets for sensors in indoor environments. This comes at a cost, however, as these energy-harvesting devices introduce new failure modes not present in traditional IoT devices: extended periods of no harvestable energy cause them to go dormant, their often simple wireless protocols are unreliable, and their limited energy reserves prohibit many diagnostic features. While energy-harvesting sensors promise easy-to-setup and maintenance-free deployments, their limitations hinder robust, long-term data collection. To continuously monitor and maintain a network of energy-harvesting devices in buildings, we propose the EH-HouseKeeper. EH-HouseKeeper is a data-driven system that monitors EH device compliance and predicts healthy signal zones in a building based on the existing gateway location(s) and building profile for easier device maintenance. EH-HouseKeeper does this by first filtering excess event-triggered data points and applying representation learning on building features that describe the path between the gateways and the device. We assessed EH-HouseKeeper by deploying 125 energy-harvesting sensors of varying types in a 17,000 square foot research infrastructure, randomly masking a quarter of the sensors as the test set for validation. The results of our 6-month data-collection period demonstrate an average greater than 80% accuracy in predicting the health status of the subset. Our results validate techniques for assessing sensor health status across device types, for inferring gateway status, and approaches to assist in identifying between gateway, transmission, and sensor faults. 

Abstract Flooding in coastal cities is increasing due to climate change and sea-level rise, stressing the traditional stormwater systems these communities rely on. Automated real-time control (RTC) of these systems can improve performance, and creating control policies for smart stormwater systems is an active area of study. This research explores reinforcement learning (RL) to create control policies to mitigate flood risk. RL is trained using a model of hypothetical urban catchments with a tidal boundary and two retention ponds with controllable valves. RL's performance is compared to the passive system, a model predictive control (MPC) strategy, and a rule-based control strategy (RBC). RL learns to proactively manage pond levels using current and forecast conditions and reduced flooding by 32% over the passive system. Compared to the MPC approach using a physics-based model and genetic algorithm, RL achieved nearly the same flood reduction, just 3% less than MPC, with a significant 88× speedup in runtime. Compared to RBC, RL was able to quickly learn similar control strategies and reduced flooding by an additional 19%. This research demonstrates that RL can effectively control a simple system and offers a computationally efficient method that could scale to RTC of more complex stormwater systems.