Intelligent Decision-Making for Building Decarbonization
Dr. Bianca Howard will share research from Columbia University’s Building Energy Research Laboratory that brings together building physics, optimization, and artificial intelligence to improve how buildings are designed and operated for decarbonization.
At the urban scale, Howard’s team uses multi-objective optimization to develop decarbonization pathways that consider not only cost and greenhouse gas emissions but also broader social goals. At the building scale, the lab investigates how accurately simulators need to represent physical systems to train reinforcement learning controllers for HVAC operation.
Presenter:
Dr. Bianca Howard is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University, where she leads the Building Energy Research Laboratory (BERL). Her research is guided by a commitment to improving the energy performance of buildings and developing practical strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the built environment. Dr. Howard earned her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University, where she was an NSF IGERT Fellow.