Annual SinBerBEST Symposium 2019

The SinBerBEST Annual Symposium took place at CREATE Tower in Singapore on Monday, August 5, 2019. The theme of this Symposium was: People, buildings and data – shaping a sustainable future. During this meeting, keynote lectures were presented from external speakers and SinBerBEST principal investigators, Energy Market Authority leadership and presenters from post-doctoral scholars. The three external speakers were Professors Jeffrey Siegel, Marilyne Andersen and Rahul Mangharam from University of Toronto, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne and University of Pennsylvania respectively. A total of 44 posters on program research works were on display in the nearby CREATE gallery for the attendees.

The program began with the opening address from the NRF chairman Dr. Lim Khiang Wee. This was followed by a lecture from Prof Spanos on the program highlights and achievements. From SinBerBEST, Professors Schiavon, Miller, Su and Mosalam gave lectures on air movement for cooling, crowd‐sourced machine learning models for city‐scale analytics, token based scheduling algorithm to reduce building energy consumption and uncertainty quantification and hybrid simulation for energy efficient building envelopes respectively. Post-doctoral scholars participating in this symposium were Drs. Sum, Arjunan, Toby Cheung and Radhakrishnan. Topics discussed include plug‐load management technology, meta‐resonators in building materials for wireless communications, building energy benchmarking system and occupant’s environmental satisfaction survey in Singapore commercial buildings.

Towards the end of the symposium, Professors Spanos and Schiavon announced the 2019 award winners for the program. Dr Han Zou won the outstanding scientist award for his excellent works on the internationally recognised WiFi-based indoor positioning system and cutting-edge WiFi-enabled IoT platform for device-free occupancy sensing. The best paper award goes to the paper entitled “Development of the ASHRAE global thermal comfort database II” published in the Journal of Building and Environment in September 2018. The distinguished service award goes to Er You Chun for her outstanding work on devising a novel administrative solution to the complex problem of transporting two large cooling coils from Singapore to Berkeley and back again, having exemplary service- and excellence-oriented attitude and improving workplace practice via the “open purchase order” system.

Presentation slides can be found here: http://sinberbest.berkeley.edu/archive/presentations