Associate Professor Panagiota Karava (PI) is leading a multi-disciplinary Purdue team with faculty members from Civil (Thanos Tzempelikos), Mechanical (Ilias Bilionis), Electrical and Computer Engineering (Jianghai Hu), as well as the Department of Psychological Sciences (Robert Proctor) that has been awarded a $1.2M National Science Foundation grant for their project, "CyberSEES -Type 2: Human-centered systems for cyber-enabled sustainable buildings."

The team proposes a new paradigm of human-centered systems to address the challenge of customized control of the thermal and visual environment in buildings. The proposed research is based on a solid approach grounded on experiments with human test-subjects, using a distinct set of laboratory facilities (Perception Based Engineering Labs, Livings Labs) along with field observations, at Purdue’s new Center for High Performance Buildings, housed in Ray W. Herrick Laboratories. This comprehensive dataset will enable, for the first time, the exploration of probabilistic classification of the relevant human perception-attributes of buildings and computationally-efficient inference algorithms for online learning of individual and population-level human preferences in perimeter building zones. Research outcomes will lead into new technological solutions for cyber-enabled human-building interfaces and self-tuned comfort delivery devices (thermostats, shading and lighting actuators) that will revolutionize building management systems.