The first Nordic Smart Building Convention took place in Helsinki on June 14 and 15, 2017. It was an inspiring event with great keynotes, tech talks, and an exhibition of smart building products and services.<\/p>\n The event was organized by HUB13<\/strong>, a leading co-working space provider in Finland. I had met with the producer of the convention, Sjoerd Postema<\/strong>, when he was planning the event. He asked for my ideas on possible topics and presenters. Later, he invited me to host a workshop and a roundtable at the convention.<\/p>\n During the event, I scribbled down some notes, from which I present the highlights here.<\/p>\n The next phase in evolution will be cognitive buildings that understand what\u2019s going on within them, right down to desk level. A cognitive building uses artificial intelligence to process and analyze sensor data. For example, it can carry out self-learning energy diagnostics and allow the use of natural language in communicating with the building.<\/p>\n Cognitive buildings have already proven their worth. Claire mentioned Tesco Ireland as an example. The company\u2019s building sensors provide a staggering 678 terabytes of data in a year. Using a cognitive system, Tesco could reduce the cooling of its facilities by 20 percent, thus saving EUR 20 million annually.<\/p>\n Data from the construction phase is a \u201cdigital twin\u201d of the physical building. Unfortunately, that data often goes unutilized. Dr Penny gave an example of facilities managers who would normally input asset data manually into a management system once a building is completed. Using data from the construction phase in a smart way, they could reduce what is typically a six-month effort into a half-day job. Ferrovial, an IBM customer, made a 3\u20137 percent saving in life cycle costs of new infrastructure by integrating data across construction phases at Heathrow Airport.<\/p>\n MIT Media Lab<\/strong> professor Joe Paradiso<\/strong> had a cornucopia of cool projects around IoT and smart buildings. He started his presentation by claiming that the problem with today\u2019s IoT is that it is unconnected. To become really useful, it must be connected. The Open Connectivity Foundation<\/strong>, among others, is paving the way to open IoT standards.<\/p>\n According to Joe, we are now in a transformational phase. Sensors and smart devices will make our experiences richer and enable extra sensory perception. He shared several examples from his lab\u2019s projects that proved the point.<\/p>\n Joe showed a live 3D model from an MIT building created in the DoppelLab<\/strong> project. It used a game engine for visualization. We could explore, in real time, visual and audio data from the building\u2019s sensors. There\u2019s a video demonstrating the interface at http:\/\/doppellab.media.mit.edu.<\/p>\nFrom Automated to Cognitive Buildings<\/h2>\n
![\"Claire](\"https:\/\/aec-business.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/claire-penny-ibm-watson.jpg\")
Dr Claire Penny<\/strong>, Watson IoT WW Solution Leader from IBM<\/strong>, talked about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how artificial intelligence can be used to make buildings smarter. From the 1980s to the turn of the century, buildings were automated. Then the smart building emerged, providing more data, of which only a small portion is ever analyzed and used to improve building and user performance. Claire claimed that 90 percent of the data provided by sensors is \u201cdark data\u201d.<\/p>\nThe Underutilized Digital Twin<\/h2>\n
\u201cWe are now in a transformational phase\u201d<\/h2>\n