2018 Mini Project

Building on four years of material generated by the Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and Environment, this report examines the future use of big data in the built environment. Experts from academia, government and private companies were invited to join monthly discussions in the Forum over four years of meetings. Big data within cities was a recurring theme and core challenges and opportunities for the advancement of the use of big data were examined.

This project focuses on the crowdsourcing data harvesting and data- mining of the multi-dimensional mechanisms of urban segregation combining the geo-coding of information with the rich attributes of this type of data. This project will conduct pilots at Cambridge in the UK and then compare it with prior study of Ningbo in China from an international perspective.

The principal novel aspect of this research project is the creation of a ‘toolkit’ of digital sensors and other methods for capturing overall occupant response in terms of comfort, satisfaction, productivity and well‐being. The toolkit consists of a range of existing sensors and additional devices that together capture the wide effects of novel resource‐efficient technologies, such as the user responses to automatic façade systems and the effects of material‐efficient structures on occupant productivity and well‐ being.

The aim of this project is to develop a new digital interface to integrate the data and visualisation of the designs of land use, buildings, transport infrastructure and associated urban services at both the neighbourhood and city scale. The interface can also be used to modify a range of aspects of such designs in the course of visualisations by non-specialists, with underlying building information data stored for feedback to the respective design teams. The focus of the work is the new method and tool for connecting digital data from multiple disciplines including architecture, city planning, transport planning, spatial economic studies and infrastructure investment.

Osmose is a project aimed at building a new operating system for situated environments that can handle the demands of thousands of sensors and actuators that need to run in a coordinated and highly reliable fashion. The mini project facilitated the purchase of networking equipment to begin the deployment of the first prototype installation in the Computer Lab. We are also planning a prototype deployment within Pembroke College’s new Mill Lane site later in the year using the new hardware. Our software design is steadily advancing, and was published in its first prototype form in IEEE HotPost 2018.

This project aims to build multiple sensors that are microphones and ways to interrogate the acoustic environment into wearable technologies for the hearing impaired subjects. These will also talk to microphones placed in the building's walls. With appropriate signal analysis, these can then segregate out the acoustic streams from different talkers, and beam form very effectively to increase the signal to noise ratio for the speaker being attended to. If they were built into corridors, they could track a speaker walking and talking, and still stream this to the hearing aids. The wearable sensors would produce an acoustic signal intermittently to measure the reverberation of the acoustic environment.

Ancillary sensing in the context of BIM concerns drawing new sources of useful information into common data environments used in the design, creation and management of the built environment physical assets. The field is ripe for disruption. The goal of this project is to develop two separate current practice, policy and future research frameworks under the umbrella theme of ancillary sensing for BIM. The basis for this will be two separate scientific literature reviews, conducted manually by and in consultation with subject matter experts, and supported by automated analysis of scientific database resources (e.g. Thomson Reuters Web of Science), culminating in the development of thought-leading managerial frameworks.

This project builds on a tool developed by two Cambridge PhD students (cited below), that allows for the generation of high resolution geographical data heat maps. One can use these heat maps to solve optimisation problems relevant to the common citizen's everyday life.

This project seeks to address the question of how European cities are adapting to BIM, and what awareness there is of BIM in future city thinking and strategies, particularly around Smart Cities. It will also look at what tools and policies are being used to take forward BIM in city development and thinking. In addition it will consider what the drivers of BIM are, and what issues are being addressed through BIM, as well as what the barriers are to BIM in future city thinking, and what the experiences of BIM are and what research, evaluation and policy exists.

The aim of the study was to explore the current use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the UK house building industry and the benefits BIM offers, and to consider the opportunities and barriers to its wider uptake. The study shows that the potential benefits from the adoption of BIM have been recognised within the industry, but that take up has been slow and prohibited by several factors.