Ocupado

Human-Centered Approach to Smart Buildings

Lead: Tamara Munzner

Collaborators: Stefan Storey (CEO of Sensible Building Solutions)

some data beside a map of UBC

Ocupado is a collaboration between PhD student Michael Oppermann, DFP faculty member (CS) Tamara Munzner, and Stefan Storey (CEO of Sensible Building Solutions, a UBC spinoff startup focused on sustainability). It is focused on creating visual and predictive decision-support tools for facilities management, centered around the use of occupancy data for multiple stakeholder contexts including building managers, custodial services, and facilities planning. It uses WiFi data as a proxy for human presence, gathered in a privacy-preserving way as location-based headcounts (so that no information is kept that could trace the trajectories of individual people). We are developing new visual analytics tools to help stakeholders usefully interpret the voluminous dataset, using the UBC Campus as a Living Lab for our initial testbed.