Lab News

Our paper "A barrier too far: Undersanding the role of intersection crossing distance on bicycle rider behavior in Chicago" was published in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. Congrats to Rohan who led this work! 

Our paper "Invisible Walls: Exploration of Microclimate Effects on Building Energy Consumption in New York City" was published in Sustainable Cities & Society. Congrats to Tom who led this work! (Note the above link is valid until Feb 25, 2023 for free access. Please use the link from the publications page after this date.)

Our paper "Beyond Energy Efficiency: A clustering approach to embed demand flexibility into building energy benchmarking" was published in Applied Energy. Congrats to Abigail who led this work! (Note the above link is valid until November 27, 2022 for free access. Please use the link from the publications page after this date.)

UIL's work on using satellite imagery to quantify building energy usage was recently featured on Stanford's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Institute.  Congrats to Tom who led this work!

In collaboration with Engie, we published a new paper "Optimizing pipe network design and central plant positioning of district heating and cooling System: A Graph-Based Multi-Objective genetic algorithm approach" in Applied Energy. Congrats to the whole team!  (Note the above link is valid until October 28, 2022 for free access. Please use the link from the publications page after this date.)

We were part of a large-scale effort led by Prof. Bing Dong (Syracuse) to curate A Global Building Occupant Behavior Database that was recenlty published in Nature Scientific Data. Congrats to the team that spanned 15 countries! 

Our paper "Data-Driven Examination of the Impact Energy Efficiency has on Demand Response Capabilities in Institutional Buildings" was published in the Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings & Cities. This paper was a collaboration with Prof. Johanna Mathieu at the University of Michigan. Congrats Abigail on this collaborative effort!

Our work was featured in a recent piece on Stanford Engineering's website: A data-driven approach to cooling.  Congrats to all the UIL team members and collaborators that contributed to this research!

Our paper "Cool roofs can mitigate cooling energy demand for informal settlement dwellers" was published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. Congrats to Alex who led this project in collaboration with Prof. Narasimha Rao at Yale and Dr. Alessio Mastrucci at IIASA. (Note the above link is valid until April 6, 2022 for free access. Please use the link from the publications page after this date.)

UIL PhD student Tom Dougherty presented his paper "SCHMEAR: scalable construction of holistic models for energy analysis from rooftops" at BuildSys 2021!  You can view a recording of his presentation here.  This work was done in collaboration with our colleagues at the Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab.

Our paper "Exploring the influence of urban context on building energy retrofit performance: A hybrid simulation and data-driven approach" was published in Advances in Applied Energy. Congrats Alex and Ben! This paper was published open-access.

Our paper "Context-aware Urban Energy Analytics (CUE-A): A framework to model relationships between building energy use and spatial proximity of urban systems" was published in Sustainable Cities & Society. Congrats to Ranjitha and Zheng who worked on this project! (Note the above link is valid until July 10, 2021 for free access. Please use the link from the publications page after this date.)

Our paper "Performance of Existing Methods in Baselining Demand Response From Commercial Building HVAC Fans" was published in the Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings & Cities. This paper was a collaboration with Prof. Johanna Mathieu and Dr. Shunbo Lei at the University of Michigan. Congrats to the whole team on this collaborative effort!

Our paper "Uncertainty Matters: Bayesian Probabilistic Forecasting for Residential Smart Meter Prediction, Segmentation, and Behavioral Measurement and Verification" was published in Energies. This paper was a collaboration with Prof. Calyton Miller and the BUDS Lab at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Congrats to the whole team on this collaborative effort!

Our paper "Data-driven optimization of building layouts for energy efficiency" was published in Energy & Buildings  Congrats to Andrew and Thomas!  (Note the above link is valid until April 23, 2021 for free access. Please use the link from the publications page after this date.)

Our paper "Modeling aggregate human mobility patterns in cities based on the spatial distribution of local infrastructure" was nominated for a Best Paper Award at 2021 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)

Our paper "Automated identification of urban substructure for comparative analysis" was published in PLoS One with Nick Ouellette from the Environmental Complexity Lab. Congrats Rohan! 

Research led by Andrew and Tom on how to bring workers back safely and efficiently to office spaces was recently featured in a Stanford Magazine article!

​​​Our paper "SynCity: Using open data to create a synthetic city of hourly building energy estimates by integrating data-driven and physics-based methods" was published in Applied Energy.  Congrats to Jon who led this work and our collaborators Amory and Prof. Miller (NUS)!

Our paper "Learning socio-organizational network structure in buildings with ambient sensing data" was published in Data-Centric Engineering. Congrats to Andrew who led this work!

Alex Nutkiewicz published a column for the International Building Performance and Simulation Association (IBPSA): Ask a Modeler: Should the Modeling Community Focus More on Existing Buildings to Battle Climate Change? Ranjitha Sivaram published an article with the Brookings Institute: How clean energy jobs can power an equitable COVID-19 recovery. Nice work Alex and Ranjitha!

Our paper "Harnessing smart meter data for a Multitiered Energy Management Performance Indicators (MEMPI) framework: A facility manager informed approach" was published in Applied Energy.  Congrats to Jon and Howard on this great piece of work!  (Note the above link is valid until September 17, 2020 for free access. Please use the link from the publications page after this date.)

As part of the Annex 79 project, UIL PhD student Andrew Sonta and Director Rishee Jain contributed to a review paper on "Simulation-aided occupant-centric building design" in Energy & Buildings. Congrats to all Annex 79 members on this collaborative effort! (Note the above link is valid until September 8, 2020 for free access. Please use the link from the publications page after this date.)

UIL collaborated with the Global Projects Center on a new publication "One approach does not fit all (smart) cities: Causal recipes for cities' use of 'data and analytics' " recently published in Cities.

UIL PhD student Kopal Nihar was awarded a Leavell Fellowship on Sustainable Built Environment from the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Congrats Kopal!

UIL PhD Student Abigail Andrews was awarded a prestigious 3-year NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!  Congrats Abigail!

UIL researcher Andrew Sonta presented his paper "Inferring occupant ties: automated inference of occupant network structure in commercial buildings" at the 5th Conference on Systems for Built Environments (BuildSys '18) in Shenzen, China. Nice work Andrew!

Our paper "Examining the feasibility of using open data to benchmark building energy usage in cities: A data science and policy perspective" was published in Energy Policy.  Congrats to Jon, Ben and Dian on this collaborative effort!  (Note the above link is valid until April 16, 2020 for free access. Please use the link from the publications page after this date.)

UIL Director Rishee Jain was awarded the NSF CAREER award for his project entitled "UrbanEMOS: An Urban Energy Management Operating System for understanding and co-optimizing building, energy and human systems at multiple scales". Support from NSF for five years is gratefully acknowledged.

Our paper "Building Relationships: Using Embedded Plug Load Sensors for Occupant Network Inference" was published in IEEE Embedded Systems Letters.  Congrats to Andrew!