ENAC Seminar Series by Dr A. Sonta
Event details
| Date | 03.02.2021 |
| Hour | 18:00 › 18:45 |
| Speaker | Dr Andrew Sonta |
| Location |
Zoom
Online
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
18:00 – 18:45 – Dr Andrew Sonta
Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, USA
Integrating social and environmental perspectives for a sustainable built environment
Foundational human goals like well-being and productivity are the primary drivers of design and management for the built environment. At the same time, because of the built environment’s outsized role in overall energy demand, our design and management decisions are also critical to our sustainable energy future. Any rational view toward infrastructure development must therefore integrate our social and environmental goals, as in the case of an office building that boosts productivity while saving energy. This integration is difficult due to the complexity of our human and energy systems. However, the emergence of sensing and data in the built environment creates the opportunity to shed light on these complexities.
This talk will elucidate this overarching research objective using the context of commercial buildings—framing the social goal as workplace productivity and the environmental goal as energy efficiency. Data from spatially and temporally granular sensors enable inference of both real-time human use of space in buildings as well as the structure of the social and organizational network of relationships among building occupants. This inference of human systems serves as a key input for the design and management of built systems in a way that promotes both collaboration among building occupants as well as energy-efficient control of the building. Across multiple scales of the built environment, this approach to understanding human-built interactions has the potential to transform the way we design and manage our cities and create more sustainable and equitable built environments.
Short bio:
Andrew Sonta is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute working in the Smart Cities focus area. He holds an MS and PhD from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he was a Stanford Graduate Fellow in the Urban Informatics Lab. His research centers on data-driven modeling, analysis, and design techniques for the improvement of social and environmental goals in the built environment. His work spans engineering, design, social science, and data science and aims to address urban sustainability challenges through a multidisciplinary lens. He has taught engineering and design courses both at Stanford and as adjunct faculty in the architecture program at the University of San Francisco. His interest in urban built and social systems stems from growing up in the city of Chicago. He earned his BS from nearby Northwestern University in civil engineering, summa cum laude, where he also studied economics and architecture.
Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, USA
Integrating social and environmental perspectives for a sustainable built environment
Foundational human goals like well-being and productivity are the primary drivers of design and management for the built environment. At the same time, because of the built environment’s outsized role in overall energy demand, our design and management decisions are also critical to our sustainable energy future. Any rational view toward infrastructure development must therefore integrate our social and environmental goals, as in the case of an office building that boosts productivity while saving energy. This integration is difficult due to the complexity of our human and energy systems. However, the emergence of sensing and data in the built environment creates the opportunity to shed light on these complexities.
This talk will elucidate this overarching research objective using the context of commercial buildings—framing the social goal as workplace productivity and the environmental goal as energy efficiency. Data from spatially and temporally granular sensors enable inference of both real-time human use of space in buildings as well as the structure of the social and organizational network of relationships among building occupants. This inference of human systems serves as a key input for the design and management of built systems in a way that promotes both collaboration among building occupants as well as energy-efficient control of the building. Across multiple scales of the built environment, this approach to understanding human-built interactions has the potential to transform the way we design and manage our cities and create more sustainable and equitable built environments.
Short bio:
Andrew Sonta is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute working in the Smart Cities focus area. He holds an MS and PhD from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he was a Stanford Graduate Fellow in the Urban Informatics Lab. His research centers on data-driven modeling, analysis, and design techniques for the improvement of social and environmental goals in the built environment. His work spans engineering, design, social science, and data science and aims to address urban sustainability challenges through a multidisciplinary lens. He has taught engineering and design courses both at Stanford and as adjunct faculty in the architecture program at the University of San Francisco. His interest in urban built and social systems stems from growing up in the city of Chicago. He earned his BS from nearby Northwestern University in civil engineering, summa cum laude, where he also studied economics and architecture.
Practical information
- General public
- Invitation required
- This event is internal
Organizer
- ENAC
Contact
- Cristina Perez