September 6, 2019 - Building Automation
By Ken Sinclair
The amount we need to learn and the speed at which we need to learn it is unprecedented. Our unparalleled requirement for rapid, deep learning and understanding is driven by simultaneous conversion of everything to an IoT world which is now further fueled by our de-carbonizing emergency supported by several major smart cities having declared a climate emergency plus our immediate need to Recalibrate for 2020 Vision.
"Education Emergency" is a mash-up of last month's coverage, Building for a Climate Emergency, plus our need to evolve and embrace the presented changes while learning and being self-educated. We need to share all that we have learned and sourced with all and any that will listen or in our case will virtually read what we have written.
Our industry is still in shambles, and it is very difficult to find the necessary connected resources.
My solution is to keep on keeping on with my need to be self-educated while sharing all that I have learned and sourced with all and any that will listen or read my humble opinions. Please read Education Emergency.
My contributing editors have helped us create our 10 free education sessions for AHR Expo 2020 Vision. We have provided a quick overview — a sneak preview of our proposed sessions with identification of some emergency education and learning you may need: 2020 Vision for Automated Buildings AHR Expo.
A fun poke by our contributing editor Nicolas Waern that explores our education emergency while connecting many Automated Buildings articles and provides a Building Buzz Breakdown. "Innovation all around, metadata tagging, cloud computing, digital twins, IoT, wireless, smart buildings, 5G, augmented reality, virtual reality, predictive maintenance, and a partridge in a pear tree. It’s a jungle out there, which is why I tried to jot down some of the things I’ve seen lately and put them in the Building Buzz-cycle depicted below. The perspective is that from a more traditional building automation perspective, and that’s why it might differ to other frameworks. However, everything in the BB-Cycle is doable today, quite easily if you know what you are doing. But it will take time to reach mainstream adoption, if ever, and there’s no time like the present."
These articles give us great insight to the re-education and the 2020 vision we all need now.
Crafting a New Tenant Experience Begins with a Rolling Start by Scott Hamilton, executive vice president of sales, Distech Controls: "According to SmartBT, the project initially began as a simple building automation system upgrade to control airflow through the use of variable air volume (VAV) controllers, but once innovative ideas for the tenant experience through digital technologies and applications were brought to the table, the project evolved. 'What began as a retrofit optimizing energy efficiency and operational expenses became secondary to the project’s newer goals – enhancing the occupant experience,' said Paul Meng, co-principal with SmartBT.
"Connected building solutions were added to the project that enabled new occupant focused feature sets. 'As the project progressed, we moved from a simple connection or integration of systems to actually unifying those systems into one user interface,' said Journey Williams, vice president of Smart BT."
Working with an open framework? Why Open Frameworks Matter. "Open frameworks are designed from the ground up to handle data from multiple sources and protocols, which makes the process of engineering integrated systems with common visualization much easier" — Chris Irwin, vice president, sales, EMEA, Asia, J2 Innovations.
How do we use machine learning to help? Machine Learning to Apply Haystack Tagging at Scale. "To most people, machine learning is a buzzword that somehow 'magically' spits out all the correct results. In this article, I’m hoping to lift the hood and give a basic explanation of how our system acquires results" — Lucy Kidd, data scientist, BUENO Systems.
Some links to some great IoT learning resources in my Across My Desk post.
This video interview previews the discussion of the BAS industry’s “Education Emergency.” The road ahead is challenging all right, but mighty favorable, especially when you’re willing to re-calibrate to a 2020 vision.
Ken Sinclair is the founder, owner, and publisher of an online resource called AutomatedBuildings.com. He writes a monthly column for FacilitiesNet.com about what is new in the Internet of Things (IOT) for building automation.
