Workshop On Embodied Human-Building Interactions; University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California; April 2020

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Everyday interactions with our physical environment are increasingly becoming "smarter", as we live and work in smart homes, smart offices, or other smart infrastructure. We are also increasingly surrounded by smart furniture, smart appliances and smart building materials. This award will support an interdisciplinary workshop and related activities that will begin to shape the new field of Human-Building Interaction (HBI), which studies the dynamic physical interplay between embodied human and building intelligences. Related activities include an innovative, educational "hack-a-thon" event that will engage a diverse cohort of students in the development of prototype HBI systems. The project serves the national interest by promoting scientific progress related to dynamic human/machine interactions within the context of intelligent buildings and the smart objects that will populate them. The proposed HBI field promises to change the way people interact with and adopt smart building technology by informing the development of the next generation of cognitive buildings that will realize a myriad of benefits for human users, including improved productivity, cognition, convenience, comfort, health and energy use - all of which are essential to societal well-being. This workshop will bring together engineers, architects, interaction designers, computer scientists, cognitive and social scientists from academic institutions and from industry to catalyze growth in the field of Human-Building Interaction (HBI). A goal of the workshop is to set the groundwork for developing working models of human behavior in built environments, models that can be incorporated into building intelligence systems to optimize human-building interactions. Another goal is to set a framework for how intelligent buildings might beneficially shape the future of work, by bridging gaps that currently divide current communities of researchers working on separate parts of the problem. Potential discussion themes include: Human-Building Collaboration; HBI and Trust; Design, Engineering and Operation of Cognitive Buildings; Virtual and Deliberate Sensing; and Security and Privacy Challenges. An educational goal is to host a two-day hack-a-thon where teams of students will design prototype HBI systems. A final objective is to publish output from the workshop and hack-a-thon in a HBI white paper. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.