Hoque Co-PI in $1M NSF grant to study intelligent building systems

Hoque Co-PI in $1M NSF grant to study intelligent building systems

Together with Co-PIs Prashant Shenoy in Computer Science and David Irwin in Electrical and Computer Engineering, BCT faculty member Simi Hoque has received a three-year, $1M grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to work with Holyoke Gas & Electric Co. (HG&E) to develop smart energy services that will improve grid efficiency, encourage energy conservation and promote local renewable energy sources such as rooftop solar. This grant was awarded through Utility Driven Smart Energy Services and will be used to design more intelligent technologies and systems for buildings. Hoque and her students will be studying building occupants' behavior to understand how they interact with energy-using equipment in their homes in order to design systems and incentives that motivate energy awareness and energy conserving behavior. Link: http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-amherst-researchers-receive-1...
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Simi Hoque and Brian Kane talk about their Eureka! experience this summer in new video

Simi Hoque and Brian Kane talk about their Eureka! experience this summer in new video

The following video, published by UMass Media Relations, summarizes another successful summer at UMass for the Eureka! Girls Inc. group of Holyoke. BCT's Simi Hoque, who coordinated their visit to UMass, introduces the many workshops in the video. One of the workshops - on building macaroni bridges - was run by BCT graduate students Carl Fiocchi, Nariman Mostafavi, and Soroush Farzinmoghadam. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nly3IN6NRe0...
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Team UMass @ ARCC 2015

Team UMass @ ARCC 2015

A picture of the happy UMass team at the ARCC 2015 conference on the "Future of Architectural Research" in Chicago, which took place last week. Left to right: Caryn Brause (Architecture Faculty), Carl Fiocchi (BCT PhD student), Troy Peters (BCT/Arch PhD student), Ajla Aksamiya (Adjunct BCT Faculty), Ray Mann (Architecture Faculty), Simi Hoque (BCT Faculty), Somayeh Tabatabaee (BCT PhD student)....
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2014 BCT Alumni & Friends Newsletter: Season’s Greetings!

2014 BCT Alumni & Friends Newsletter: Season’s Greetings!

A Message from the BCT Program Director As we conclude another successful semester in the BCT program, we are very proud to now have close to 200 undergraduate students and 10 graduate students including several PhDs. This year brought some changes to our program: With Dave Damery retiring (more on that below), I have taken over as program director. We also have a new faculty member, Dr. Ho-Sung Kim (see also below) and we will embark on a search for a replacement for Dave Damery soon. We are also very excited about a new building that will soon be our home - the “Integrated Design Building”. This state-of-the-art building will encompass many sustainable features (like an engineered wood structure) and will offer us better spaces for teaching, collaboration, labs, shops, and computer facilities. More on this below. If you haven’t done so yet, I would encourage you to join the new BCT student and alumni LinkedIn group. It is a great way to stay...
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New Publication: “A framework for integrated urban metabolism analysis tool (IUMAT)”

Abstract: IUMAT (Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool) is a system-based sustainability analysis tool. It quantifies and aggregates the social, economic and environmental capitals of urban activity in an integrated framework focusing on the metabolic flows of urban development. This paper builds on previous work on urban metabolism and advances an analytical framework that defines how the consumption of resources and resulting environmental impacts are calculated as indices of sustainability in an urban region. The benefits of integrated urban modeling using the proposed framework as well as the data sources are detailed. The underlying analytical framework for the proposed tool applies the dynamics of choice, time, and scale towards dynamically interpreting demographic and economic factors. IUMAT's calculative modules for land cover, transportation, and energy/water/resource use are described as well as the modality of connections between the modules. Nariman Mostafavi, Mohamad Farzinmoghadam, Simi Hoque, A framework for integrated urban metabolism analysis tool (IUMAT), Building and Environment, Volume 82, December 2014, Pages 702-712, ISSN 0360-1323,...
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