Yesterday marked my first day as Chief Technology Officer at Neurobat AG, a young company formed in Switzerland to industrialize and market advanced building control algorithms, such as the ones commonly researched and developed at my former laboratory, the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory at EPFL. This also marks the end of almost three […]
I always try very hard to keep my posts within the main topic of this blog, namely computers in the context of building automation and simulation. Occasionally I fail, like for today’s post. I’d like to tell you about a software company co-founded by a friend and fellow Toastmaster of mine, David Portabella. The company’s […]
As you might know, my primary background stems from the field of academia and research, but over the past years my interests have focused increasingly on software engineering. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear to me today that if I had known what I know today about software, I would without doubt have been […]
Recently I stumbled upon a blog entry by Marc Fleury, whom I believe is one of the lead developers on the JBoss Application Server project. In this post he describes his new pet project, OpenRemote, which has of late bloomed into a full blown affair. There’s an official website and the project seems to be […]
Two articles from new new issue of Building Simulation sound particularly interesting: Comparing computer run time of building simulation programs, by Tianzhen Hong, Fred Buhl, Philip Haves, Stephen Selkowitz and Michael Wetter. This paper presents an approach for comparing the computer run time of building simulation programs. The computing run time of a simulation program […]
I have released version 0.2 of the Java GNU Scientific Library (JGSL) project, its second public alpha release. Please visit the JGSL project website for more information. This second release provides additional wrapper classes for the GSL stats module (mean, variance, standard deviation, etc.). Feel free to try it out and get back to me […]
More papers directly relevant to the main topic of this blog: Monitoring and modelling of manually-controlled Venetian blinds in private offices: a pilot study by Vorapat Inkarojrit This study presents results from a window blind usage survey and field study that was conducted in California, USA during a period spanning from the vernal equinox to […]
The following papers from Building and Environment Volume 43, Issue 12, December 2008 are relevant to the field of building automation and simulation. Photometry and colorimetry characterisation of materials in daylighting evaluation tools by M. Bodart, R. de Penaranda, A. Deneyer, G. Flamant. This paper presents a methodology for evaluating the photometric and colorimetric characteristics […]
If you can measure it you can control it, and that is also true of your energy consumption. Two energy-monitoring devices have recently been brought to my attention that are not only easy to use, but also to install. The first one is the OWL, and consists of a wireless clip you put around your […]
Recently I got this email from Dr. Dimitrios Gyalistras of ETH Zurich: I would like to draw your attention to the newly launched website of the project Use of Weather and Occupancy Forecasts for Optimal Building Climate Control (OptiControl): http://www.sysecol.ethz.ch/OptiControl/ OptiControl is a collaborative effort by the ETH Zurich, EMPA Dübendorf, MeteoSwiss and Siemens Building […]