Prof. David Gerber
Title: Design Matter(s)
Abstract: Dr. Gerber speaks to the importance of design and computational design as the creative means to architect, engineer, and construct our built environments through the use of data, technologies, and integrations, sustainably. He presents projects and program on topics of design methods, digital twins, and design informed innovation.
Bio: Dr. Gerber holds a joint appointment at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC School of Architecture as a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Practice and of Architecture. Dr. Gerber is the Director of the Civil Engineering Building Science undergraduate program and the Director of the Masters in Advanced Design and Construction Technology Program. Dr. Gerber is also an associate Director for Office of Technology Innovation & Entrepreneurship. His current focus is on the development of a digital twin as a Living Lab for research and sustainability.
Prof. Burcin Becerik-Gerber
Title: Intelligent Environments that Support Comfort, Well-being, and Performance
Abstract: Advances in data science and artificial intelligence are transforming our society, allowing the formation of intelligent built environments while providing unprecedented opportunities for built environments that can support comfort, well-being, inclusion and improve work performance. While energy efficient built environments have gained tremendous attention from both academia and research, the pandemic made us realize the impact of built environments on health, well-being, inclusion, productivity and human experience, in general. Well-being is strongly dependent on the links between the built environment and the personal, cultural, and social factors that drive health, productivity, and comfort. There is a need for facilitating new forms of collaborations by integrating disciplines and networks in the building, computation and health domains and to produce innovative human-centric building design and operation strategies that will benefit the larger community of scholars and practitioners. This talk will focus on CENTIENTS’ (Center for Intelligent Environments) recent work on intelligent work environments that improve worker productivity while supporting well-being. We will cover a range of topics on the changing world of work including intelligent buildings that sense user data, model user behavior, reason and interact with their users through the applications of AI and human-machine collaborations.
Bio: Dr. Burçin Becerik-Gerber is a professor and Chair of Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and founder and the Director of USC Center for Intelligent Environments (CENTIENTS).Duringthelast15years,herresearchfocused onadvanceddataacquisition,modeling, visualization for design, construction, and control of user-centered responsive and adaptive built environments. She pioneered a new field: Human-Building Interaction (HBI), which is a convergent field that represents the growing complexities of the dynamic interplay between human experience and intelligence within built environments. She published her work in more than 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. Her work has received support worth over $12 million from a variety of sources, including the NSF, DoE, DHS and DoT and corporate sponsors. In 2012, she was named by the MIT’s Technology Review as one of the top 35 technology innovators under the age of 35 (first civil engineering faculty to receive this recognition). She received the FIATECH Celebration of Engineering and Technology Innovation Award in 2018. The same year, she was awarded the Rutherford Visiting Fellowship by the Alan Turing Institute, UK’s national data science and AI institute. Between 2012-2019, she held the inaugural Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair. In 2020, she was appointed as a USC Viterbi Dean's Professor. In 2021, se was elected to the National Academy of Construction. Since 2021, she serves on the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She received mentoring and leadership recognitions such as the Mellon Mentoring Award (2017) and an Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering and Science (ELATES) Fellowship (2021), which speak to her commitment to education and leadership in academia. In 2022, she received an Emmy Award as a co-producer of the documentary, “Lives, Not Grades,” which told the story of a novel course, she co-designed and co- taught, that focused on engineering innovation for global challenges