Abstract

Building operation is responsible for a large share of global energy consumption and carbon emissions. Despite the growing adoption of sensors in buildings, controls are still simple, reactive, and must be customized for every building based on its size, floor plan, location, and occupancy schedule. In this talk I will give an overview of key challenges in designing safe and optimal control strategies for buildings, and present some of the recent work we did to address these challenges.

Bio: Omid Ardakanian is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He received the BSc in Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, and the MMath and PhD in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Before joining UofA, he was an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of British Columbia. Dr. Ardakanian’s research focuses on the design and implementation of intelligent networked systems, such as smart buildings and grids. He received the best paper award at ACM e-Energy (2013), ACM BuildSys (2016, 2022), and IEEE PES General Meeting (2017). He was a guest editor of a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, and TPC co-chair of ACM e-Energy 2021. He is currently serving on the executive committee of ACM SIGENERGY and is an editor of SIGENERGY Energy Informatics Review (EIR).