With interdisciplinary research spanning building engineering, design, and social science, Data Science Institute (DSI) postdoctoral research fellow Andrew Sonta explores the complex relationships between human, environmental, and built systems. He leverages data science to improve life in crowded, urban environments with a focus on interconnected elements, including buildings, transportation routes, infrastructure, and power supply. His goal: “To develop tools that integrate our social and environmental goals into the built environment.”

Sonta’s research examines patterns of human behavior, and considers their implications for the design of buildings and urban spaces. He also explores the distribution of amenities in cities, how city data may be used to help model and optimize paths for emergency vehicles, and how buildings and cities may be improved to contribute to our energy future.

“Changes to the built environment that promote sustainability need to take human systems and behaviors into consideration,” Sonta said. “We use computation and data science modeling to better understand how we can incorporate the human element into sustainable design.”

Sonta joined the DSI community at the beginning of 2021 after completing his doctorate in civil engineering at Stanford University. There, he worked on projects that leveraged data on human behavior in office buildings to build models and simulations that may help improve building efficiency and organizational effectiveness. His methodological approach has focused on sensing, or collecting data from sensors in the built environment, to build models that offer insights into when and how people use the space and how people work together. “With these models,” Sonta explained, “we can start to ask questions about what we can do to the building to support energy efficient control, for example, or to foster collaboration and connection.”

At DSI, Sonta works with Smart Cities Center co-chairs Fred Jiang, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer engineering, and Andrew Smyth, a professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics, to develop models and simulations for use in buildings and cities. With electrical engineering doctoral students Peter Wei and Yanchen Liu, Sonta examines how a range of aspects of building use, including lighting, electrical energy consumption, temperature, humidity, air quality, HVAC systems, window placement, and seating arrangements, all affect the lived environment. The collaborators use this data to build new models and augment existing models to understand how these insights can translate into user recommendations. “By developing more accurate data-driven models and simulation environments for buildings, we hope to create an intelligent building system that incorporates occupant actions in its decisions,” Jiang said. “Such a system has the potential to significantly reduce energy consumption while preserving occupant comfort levels.” 

One of Sonta’s recent projects used data on occupant behavior to develop recommendations on how to optimize building layouts for reductions in lighting energy use. Another project leveraged data from plug load energy sensors in office buildings to model how people work together in what Sonta refers to as a “social organizational network.” Insights from the latter were recently used to consider COVID-19 safe occupant strategies by helping determine network topology-based reintroduction schemes to minimize disease spread, socio-organizational disruptions, and impact on building energy use.

— Karina Alexanyan, Ph.D.