SimAUD

An amazing group of dedicated and passionate people (that continues to grow every year) helped me to launch and grow a highly successful scientific conference called the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design, also known as SimAUD. My intent was to build a multidisciplinary scientific community focused on advancing simulation theory and the use of simulation to leverage computation to transform the built environment to become sustainable. I am immensely proud of all of the chairs, committees, and authors that have made this community great for over a decade.

Thanks especially to Ramtin Attar and Gabriel Wainer who were both instrumental in the launch and in building the foundation and Rhys Goldstein who contributed significantly to get SimAUD off the ground.

Parametric Human Project

I founded the Parametric Human Project as a non-profit organization striving to build a global team of research scientists, professional IT, and data security specialists. We are focused on providing a scalable cloud-based data management solution for the human health research community. Members of the Parametric Human Project use our secure access-controlled data repository to facilitate their research, manage access to their datasets and ultimately contribute to our growing statistically-based understanding of the human body. We believe that by creating a centralized data repository for multi-disciplinary collaboration pertaining to all knowledge of human biology, we will vastly improve the opportunity for future advancements in healthcare, design and personal wellness.

Thanks especially to Steen Schledermann who kick-started the organization, and Gord Kurtenbach who was a strong supporter, truly launching the project.

SyDEVS

The SyDEVS open source C++ library provides a framework for modeling and simulating complex systems. SyDEVS allows physics solvers, state machines, and other types of simulation models to be implemented as independent nodes and later integrated. Even nodes that use different time steps (or variable time steps) can be linked together and allowed to interact. The SyDEVS framework is based on the Symmetric DEVS formalism, a set of conventions combining three modeling paradigms: discrete event simulation, dataflow programming and agent-based modeling. These foundations, together with a novel multiscale representation of time, gives SyDEVS the generality needed to support essentially any type of simulation, regardless of domain, time scale, or time advancement scheme.

This project was led by Rhys Goldstein who impresses me continuously with his incredible achievements on this project, and others, advancing the field to a new level. I managed this project and helped to form the vision for the system.

Project Dasher

Buildings are the primary cause of Green House Gases, followed by Animal Products, which in turn is followed by Transportation. To improve building performance, working toward sustainability, Project Dasher was conceived as a “building debugger”. It was inspired by a picture I saw of the Green Lighthouse building on the campus of the University of Copenhagen.

I wanted to see the “live” version of that diagram of how the building was operating. Dasher was to be a tool that would help architects and operations engineers to understand how their building is working (or not working) and to see how effective an intervention would be.

Thanks especially to Alex Tessier, Simon Breslav, Kean Walmsley, Mike Lee, Hali Larsen, Jacky Bibliowicz, Josh Cameron, Ramtin Attar, Rhys Goldstein, Michael Glueck, Liviu Calin, and Pan Zhang for a truly Herculean effort over several years.