April 26, 2019
Abstract: Impact of buildings on the total energy consumption in the U.S. is well-known. The electricity consumption of buildings accounts for nearly three quarters of the total electricity consumption in the U.S. and Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning (HVAC) energy consumption in developed countries accounts for half of the energy use in buildings. This talk will provide an overview of ongoing research at biLAB on smarter ways to deal with building operations and their impact on energy use, as well as better approaches to streamline and improve buildings’ response to peak events. These two projects are at the intersection of data science, energy, and building systems.
Dr. Semiha Ergan is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering (courtesy) at New York University, and an associated faculty at CUSP. With her background in civil engineering, data science, and building informatics, she works on improving buildings’ performance during design, construction, and operation phases.
She leads the Building Informatics and Visualization Lab (biLAB), where she actively seeks for data driven and model-based solutions to operational challenges associated with construction and operation of civil infrastructure systems, with an emphasis on buildings. Her work has been supported by DOE, NSF, DARPA, and private organizations. Her achievements have been recognized by a number of awards most recently with DARPA Young Faculty Award (2015) and the Construction Industry Institute (CII) New Scholar Award (2015). She is the Vice Chair for ASCE TCCIT Visualization, Information Modeling and Simulation Committee, an Associate Editor of ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, and academic committee member of Construction Industry Institute (CII).