The organizers of BuildSys 2012 — ACM’s workshop on systems’ issues in the area of building controls, energy management, embedded, and networked sensors — have issued a call for papers. The workshop, which “provides an ideal convergence venue for the Sensor, Building, and Energy research communities to address the research challenges facing the design, deployment, use, and fundamental limits of these systems,” will take place in Toronto on Nov. 6th.

Notable about this particular call: to encourage researchers to present truly visionary concepts at the interface between computing and sustainability, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is sponsoring awards to three Best Paper submissions to the workshop — as it has been doing at a number of research conferences in recent months.

From the call for papers (following the link):

The world is increasingly experiencing a strong need for energy consumption reduction and a need for efficient use of scarce natural resources. Official studies report that buildings account for the largest portion of World’s energy expenditure and have the fastest growth rate. Information technology such as cyber-physical systems, wireless sensor networks, embedded control, computational modeling, machine learning, and simulation tools play a key role in enabling energy-saving measures for buildings, its surrounding spaces, and other networks such as smart grid and smart water networks that they connect to. We are interested is a life-cycle perspective across design, construction, and operation of buildings, and in energy consumption in both direct (electricity, gas etc.) and indirect (embedded energy in water) forms.

And the topic areas of interest:

• Building controls, optimization, and learning
• Sensing technologies and sensor information processing methods
• Measurement, modeling, and visualization of building performance
• Occupancy and occupant behavior modeling
• Information feedback, incentives, and other methods for influencing occupant behavior
• Computationally assisted design of energy-efficient buildings
• Simulation and emulation tools and test-beds
• Smart energy-aware devices and appliances
• Efficient building systems: HVAC, enclosures, lighting, water heating etc.
• Interaction with external networks and systems: electricity, transportation system, water
• Demand-response technologies for smart-meter / smart-grid integration
• Renewable energy integration
• Local energy generation, harvesting, and storage
• Energy considerations across multiple buildings at campus and regional scale
• Energy-water nexus in buildings
• Information technology standards for building energy management
• Security, privacy, and robustness issues

The organizers note that “papers addressing other emerging aspects of building energy are [also] welcome.”

The workshop also welcomes “demo abstracts” describing technology that members of the community wish to showcase. Examples include:

• Increase energy awareness and reduce consumption by leveraging on sensing systems/social networking/mobile phones, novel visualization and other forms of media to convey relevant information to users;
• Systems that can influence building occupant behaviour towards a more parsimonious usage of electricity, gas, heating, water, etc.;
• Monitor and actuate appliances in residential and industrial settings (e.g. data centres, HVAC, etc.)
• Monitor and control of alternative energy sources aiming at an increase of production efficacy;
• Model and simulate heating, cooling, lighting, ventilation, water usage and other energy flows in buildings and surrounding spaces through the combination of real data from sensors and popular energy simulation tools such as Energy Plus and TrnSys;
• Create innovative tools to model and visualize energy expenditure and production (from, e.g., solar panels, wind turbines);
• Integrate sensor-based systems to improve grid operation and energy distribution (electricity, gas, water);
• Sensor systems for the identification of appliances in industrial and home environments, which can be used to estimate the energy usage/production model and to predict future demands; [and]
• Emerging communication standards for the collection of data from smart meters and the control of HVAC systems.

The deadline for paper/poster submission is July 30th. Camera-ready papers will be due Sept. 14th.

To learn more, check out the BuildSys 2012 website or e-mail a member of the program committee.

I hope you’ll take a moment to see if some of your research may be appropriate for this conference.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)