About the lab
HUman Building Synergy Laboratory
Human–AI–Building Interaction.
Vision
Buildings that understand the people in them — and can be argued with.
HUBS works toward built environments that understand their occupants well enough to act on their behalf, and explain themselves well enough to be trusted. That takes three things at once: a building that senses without intruding, an agent that reasons under real constraints, and an occupant who keeps the last word.
Mission
The questions we keep asking.
One question per corner of the triangle, and one that belongs to all three.
Of the human
- How do people express what they need from a space?
- What do those words actually mean, for that particular person?
- What makes someone trust an automated system enough to leave it on?
Of the AI
- When should an agent act on its own judgment, and when must it defer?
- How does it arbitrate between occupants who want opposite things?
- What does an explanation have to contain to be worth anything?
Of the building
- How can systems sense occupants non-invasively and effortlessly?
- How can a space be conditioned at the scale of a person, not a zone?
- How does a building report its own limits and failures honestly?
Of all three
- Who gets the last word when they disagree?
- Who pays when comfort is traded for grid flexibility?
- What happens to the direct human–building relationship in between?
Pillars
What holds the work up.
Human agency
The occupant keeps authority. An override is the most valuable signal the system receives, not a failure of it.
Machine reasoning
Agents that plan under real constraints — grid, cost, physics, other people — and can say what they did and why.
Physical embodiment
Sensing and actuation that reach the scale of a single person, and report back what actually happened.
Synergy
Comfort and energy treated as a win-win to be engineered, not a trade-off to be split.