BuildSys 2021
The 8th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation

Best Paper of BuildSys'21

PIRMedic: A Physics-based Fault Diagnosis for Passive Infra-Red (PIR) Sensors

Ashish Kashinath(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Sibin Mohan(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Akshay Nambi(Microsoft Research), Sumukh Marathe(Microsoft Research)

Best Paper Runner Up

VPeak: Exploiting Volunteer Energy Resources for Flexible Peak Shaving

Phuthipong Bovornkeeratiroj(University of Massachusetts Amherst), John Wamburu(University of Massachusetts Amherst), David Irwin(University of Massachusetts Amherst), Prashant Shenoy(University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Holistic Energy Awareness for Intelligent Drones

Srinivasan Iyengar(Microsoft Research India), Ravi Raj Saxena(Indian Institute of Science), Joydeep Pal(Indian Institute of Science), Bhawana Chhaglani(University of Massachusetts Amherst), Anurag Ghosh(Carnegie Mellon University), Venkata N. Padmanabhan(Microsoft Research India), Prabhakar T. Venkata(Indian Institute of Science)

Energy-Efficient Parking Analytics System using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Yoones Rezaei(University of Pittsburgh), Stephen Lee(University of Pittsburgh), Daniel Mosse(University of Pittsburgh)

BuildSys 2021 Call for Papers

Built environments and critical urban infrastructures, account for over half of society’s energy consumption and are the mainstay of our nation’s economy, security and health. Advances in the effective integration of networked sensors, building controls, and physical infrastructure are transforming our society. In the information age, unprecedented research of cyber physical infrastructures includes: the acquisition, integration, and analysis of big and heterogeneous data such as sensors, devices, vehicles, buildings, and human, to tackle the major issues that cities face, e.g., air pollution, increased energy consumption and traffic congestion.

Systems optimization, data analysis and modeling applied to the built environment are particularly important in improving our society, e.g., by increasing its sustainability and enhancing people’s quality-of-life. These systems represent the foundation for emerging “smart cities”.

The 8th ACM International Conference on Systems for Built Environments (BuildSys'21) will be held November 17-18, 2021 in Coimbra, Portugal.

BuildSys is the premier conference for researchers and practitioners working to develop and optimize smart infrastructure systems that are driven by sophisticated sensing, computing, and control functions. We invite original contributions including, but not limited to the following:

• Applications in smart and connected communities;
• Sensing and control for urban infrastructure systems;
• Novel sensor methodologies, techniques, and tools;
• Sensing and control of electrical, gas, and water loads;
• Improved user interfaces to built infrastructure;
• Modeling, simulation, optimization, and control of heating, cooling, lighting, ventilation, water usage and other resource flows in built environments;
• Sensor systems and applications that enhance energy efficiency, energy reliability, durability and comfort;
• Systems that integrate infrastructure with the smart grid to offer demand response and ancillary services;
• Distributed generation, alternative energy, renewable sources, and energy storage in buildings;
• Emerging standards for data collection, energy control, or interoperability of disparate devices or systems;
• Sensing, modeling, and predicting the urban heartbeat including sounds, movements, and radio spectrum;
• Human in the loop sensing and control for efficient usage of electricity, gas, heating, water;
• Sensor systems for reliable occupancy counting;
• Long-lived and energy harvesting sensor systems;
• Scalable indoor localization and contextual computing;
• Security, privacy, safety, and reliability in built systems;
• Empirical studies of city-scale wireless communications;
• Environmental Sensing;
• Vehicle technologies and Traffic.
This year, we are in particular interested in
• Smart building and city technologies and initiatives in developing countries
• COVID impact and response in smart infrastructure

Paper Types

We solicit two types of original submissions:

• Regular papers for oral presentation (10 pages)
• Notes papers for oral presentation (4 pages)

Notes papers are 4-page papers intended to discuss preliminary research results, advocate new research directions, describe public software or datasets, or present short projects that do not warrant a 10-page paper. Notes papers serve, in part, to encourage younger researchers and research teams entering this field of research to share their work. We also encourage Notes paper submissions from industry participants that may not be able to devote resources to a full paper. While Notes papers are not expected to have extensive evaluations, they will be reviewed based on the novelty of their ideas, potential for impact, and quality of presentation.

Submission Guidelines

Submitted papers must be unpublished and must not be currently under review for any other publication. Submissions must be full papers, at most 10 single-spaced US Letter (8.5” x 11”) pages, including figures, tables, references and appendices. Submissions for Note papers must be at most 4 single-spaced US Letter (8.5"x11") pages, including figures, tables, references and appendices. All submissions must use the LaTeX (preferred) or Word styles found here. Authors must make a good faith effort to anonymize their submissions by: (1) using the "anonymous" option for the class and (2) using "anonsuppress" section where appropriate. Papers that do not meet the size, formatting, and anonymization requirements will not be reviewed. Please note that ACM uses 9-pt fonts in all conference proceedings, and the style (both LaTeX and Word) implicitly define the font size to be 9-pt. Please refer to publication chair's Note as well as the User Guide of the new class. Accepted submissions will be available on the ACM digital library on the first day of the conference.

A subset of the best conference papers will be fast-tracked to the ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN).

Submission Link

All papers must be in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) and submitted through the web submission form. For notes papers, the submission site has a checkbox called "Notes papers." Those who submit notes papers need to check this box to indicate their paper types.

Important Dates

• Abstract Registration: July 9 July 23, 2021, AOE.
• Paper Submission: July 16 July 23, 2021, AOE.
• Paper Notification: September 10, 2021, AOE.
• Camera Ready Submission: October 1, 2021, AOE.
• Registration deadline:
  Early bird: September 1st - October 20th
  Late: October 21st - November 14th
  On-site: November 15th onwards
  

BuildSys/SenSys 2021 - Joint Doctoral Colloquium (PhD Forum)

The Doctoral Colloquium of BuildSys/SenSys 2021 seeks to provide a friendly, supportive, and constructive environment where Ph.D. students can explore and develop their research interests in an interdisciplinary workshop guided by a panel of experienced researchers. The Doctoral Colloquium offers an opportunity to share experiences with other Ph.D. students and meet with accomplished international researchers and obtain feedback from them.

The Doctoral Colloquium committee will review submissions to ensure quality, relevance, and potential benefit from attendance. Accepted Ph.D. Forum abstracts will be included in the ACM Digital Library. Authors of accepted submissions are expected to participate in the Doctoral Colloquium event. There will be no separate registration fee for the Doctoral Colloquium.

Current Ph.D. students in the early stages of their career are encouraged to submit a 2-page research summary describing the work in progress and including a 100-word abstract. Things to consider for inclusion in the research summary might be: the expected contribution to the field; the original idea or thesis statement; the problem domain and the specific problem addressed; a brief overview of related work; the methodological approach; research carried out and results so far. The abstract should also include a one-paragraph biography of the student, including the names and affiliations of the research advisor(s), and the expected date of dissertation submission.

Technical Program Committee and Panel

• Bharathan Balaji (Amazon)
• Jonathon Fagert (Baldwin Wallace University)
• Dezhi Hong (University of California San Diego)
• Jason Koh (Mapped)
• Clayton Miller (National University of Singapore)
• Mostafa Mirshekari (Searchable.ai)
• June Young Park (University of Texas at Arlington)
• Andrew Sonta (Columbia University)

Important Dates

• Submission Deadline: September 24, 2021 11:59pm AOE
• Notification Deadline: October 9, 2021
• Camera-ready Deadline: October 22, 2021 11:59pm AOE
• Doctoral Colloquium Day(s): November 14, 2021

Submission Details

• The paper should not exceed 2 pages.
• Submission template format should follow ACM Master Article Template (with sigconf setting).
• Submissions do not need to be anonymous and should have the PhD student as the sole author
• Submission system: BuildSys 2021 PhD Forum

Workshops

• 1st ACM SIGEnergy Workshop on Fair, Accountable, Transparent, and Ethical (FATE) AI for Smart Environments and Energy Systems
• 2nd International Workshop on Reinforcement Learning for Energy Management in Buildings & Cities (RLEM)
• 1st ACM International Workshop on Big Data and Machine Learning for Smart Buildings and Cities
• 4th ACM DATA Workshop, the Data: Acquisition To Analysis (DATA)

1st ACM SIGEnergy Workshop on Fair, Accountable, Transparent, and Ethical (FATE) AI for Smart Environments and Energy Systems

With the advent of IoT, high performance computing, and ubiquitous and smart sensing, the SenSys/BuildSys community is noticing a big shift in the adoption of data-driven black-box modeling (also referred to as AI) to solve problems in the space of smart environments and energy systems. As a result, these AI-enabled systems for smart buildings, smart cities, smart grids, electric transportation, among others are attaining better accuracy and efficiency numbers every year. However, these data-driven black-box solutions are rarely held accountable for the impact of their actions on the human in the loop which significantly impacts their real-world adoption. To truly conceptualize the idea of smart systems for everyone, it is critical to study AI-enabled smart environments and energy systems to enforce energy equity and ensure not just clean and resilient energy systems, but also make them affordable and accessible for all. The first ACM SIGEnergy workshop on Fair, Accountable, Transparent, and Ethical AI for Smart Environments and Energy Systems intends to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds and discuss key issues, challenges, breakthroughs, and socio-economic impact in developing fair, accountable, transparent and ethical AI techniques for smart environments and energy systems.

Call for paper

FATEsys 2021 Call for Papers

Important Dates

• - Submission Deadline: September 3, 2021 (AOE)
• - Notifications: September 24, 2021 (AOE)
• - Camera-ready: October 1, 2021 (AOE)
• - Workshop: TBD

General Co-Chairs

• Milan Jain (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA)
• Pandarasamy Arjunan (Berkeley Eduation Alliance for Research in Singapore (BEARS))

2nd International Workshop on Reinforcement Learning for Energy Management in Buildings & Cities (RLEM)

RLEM brings together researchers and industry practitioners for the advancement of (deep) reinforcement learning (RL) in the built environment as it is applied for managing energy in civil infrastructure systems (energy, water, transportation). Following BuildSys's directive, the conference will be held virtually in November 17th 2021. More information about how to join the virtual sessions will be posted here soon.
RLEM'21 will be held in conjunction with ACM BuildSys'21

Submission

• Submission Portal: https://rlem21.hotcrp.com

Important Dates

• - Abstract submission: August 16, 2021 (AOE)
• - Paper submission: August 23, 2021 (AOE) (AOE)
• - Notifications: September 27, 2021 (AOE)
• - Camera-ready: October 1, 2021 (AOE)
• - Workshop: TBD

General Chair

• Zoltan Nagy (University of Texas at Austin)

1st ACM International Workshop on Big Data and Machine Learning for Smart Buildings and Cities

The proliferation of urban sensing, IoT, and big data in buildings, cities, and urban areas provides unprecedented opportunities for a deeper understanding of occupant behavior, transportation, and energy and water usage patterns. However, utilizing the existing data sources and modeling methods in building science to model urban scale occupant behaviors can be pretty challenging. Therefore, technological progress is needed to unlock its full potential. In order to fulfill the latter task, this workshop focuses on the methodologies for big urban and building data collection, analytics, modeling, and real-world technology deployment. Additionally, a spotlight will be put on the ongoing project IEA EBC Annex 79 Subtask 2: Data-driven occupant modeling strategies and digital tools.

The workshop aims to open up discussions on 1) challenges of the current modeling approaches in building science, 2) big data modeling paradigms that could be applicable in building science, urban infrastructure data modeling, 3) requirements on the data collection infrastructure required for increasing the volume of data collection, and 4) future research directions using urban big data. An important part of the workshop will be dedicated to accelerating the open-world deployment of developed technologies. For instance, how can the guidelines, model benchmarking, and standardization unlock the potential of the big data, buildings, urban scale occupant behavior modeling and energy consumption data.

4th ACM DATA Workshop, the Data: Acquisition To Analysis (DATA)

As the enthusiasm for and success of the Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), and Smart Buildings grows, so too does the volume and variety of data collected by these systems. How do we ensure that this data is of high quality, and how do we maximize the utility of collected data such that many projects can benefit from the time, cost, and effort of deployments?

The Data: Acquisition To Analysis (DATA) workshop aims to look broadly at interesting data from interesting sensing systems. The workshop considers problems, solutions, and results from all across the real-world data pipeline. We solicit submissions on unexpected challenges and solutions in the collection of datasets, on new and novel datasets of interest to the community, and on experiences and results—explicitly including negative results—in using prior datasets to develop new insights.

The workshop aims to bring together a community of application researchers and algorithm researchers in the sensing systems and building domains to promote breakthroughs from integration of the generators and users of datasets. The workshop will foster cross-domain understanding by enabling both the understanding of application needs and data collection limitations.

Best Poster/Demo

Unsupervised personal thermal comfort prediction via adversarial domain adaptation

Hari Prasanna Das(UC Berkeley), Stefano Schiavon(UC Berkeley), Costas J. Spanos(UC Berkeley)

Call for Posters and Demos

ACM BuildSys 2020 welcomes exciting demonstrations of novel technologies, applications, and hardware for the built environment as well as posters showing promising early work. We seek participation from both industry and academia for demonstrations and posters. Selection of demonstration and posters will be based on a short abstract, evaluated based on technical merit and innovation as well as the potential to stimulate interesting discussions and exchange of ideas at the conference.

The demo and poster session is a great forum to share your early-stage work with a broader audience. Accepted abstracts will appear in the regular conference proceedings. At least one author of every accepted demonstration or poster abstract is required to register and attend the conference.

Topics of Interest

We welcome all topics that align with the Buildsys main conference topics of interest

Poster abstract

Poster abstracts should report on research work where at least some preliminary results are available, but they need not necessarily describe completed work. An easel will be provided for all posters. All poster abstract submissions must strictly adhere to the formatting guidelines specified below.

Demo abstract

Demo abstracts should describe both the technology being showcased as well as the user experience of the demo. All demo abstract submissions must strictly adhere to the formatting guidelines specified below. The authors of the accepted demos will be invited to submit a short video together with the camera-ready version of the abstract.

Submission and Formatting Instructions

Abstract submissions should be no more than 2 pages and must follow a double-column format. All figures, appendices, and references must fit within this limit. Paper reviewing is single-blind and submissions should list author names on the front page.

Your submission must be in PDF format with all fonts embedded and be formatted according to the official ACM Proceedings format. Submissions that do not meet the page limit, size, and formatting requirements will not be reviewed. Word and LaTeX templates are available here. Please note that you must use the “Strict Adherence to SIGS style” template option. Note that ACM uses 9-pt fonts in all conference proceedings, and the style (both LaTeX and Word) implicitly define the font size to be 9-pt. Please refer to the publication chair's Note as well as the User Guide of the new class.

Due to the short interval between the notification of acceptance and the camera-ready deadline, we strongly encourage authors to follow the camera-ready formatting guidelines as closely as possible even for the initial abstract submission.

Important Dates and Submission Link

• Submission Deadline: August 27th, September 24th, 2021 AOE
• Notification of acceptance: September 3rd, 2021 October 8th, 2021
• Camera-ready abstract: September 17th, 2021 October 22nd, 2021
• Submission site: https://buildsys2021posterdemo.hotcrp.com/