Lunchtime Seminar: Using interactive models to aid collaborative decision-making

Join us for this lunchtime seminar with Dr Ralph Evins from University of Victoria, Canada. Dr Evins is currently in Bristol as part of the ‘Next Generation’ Visiting Researcher Programme. The seminar is jointly hosted by the Cabot Institute’s City Futures and Low Carbon Energy themes.

Using interactive models to aid collaborative decision-making

Models of many forms can provide valuable insights into engineered and natural systems. However, there is trend towards ever more complex and cumbersome models that cannot be explored in an interactive manner. This is typified by large engineering simulations, which can take a long time to configure, execute and display results. Using examples from the design of low-energy buildings, this talk will explore the use of ‘surrogate modelling’ to provide very fast models using machine learning. These can be used interactively by design teams, community focus groups and others to explore a given problem space. The hypothesis is that humans can learn how complex systems behave by ‘playing around’ with such models. This talk will give a brief overview of the methods, which could be applied in many domains, and pose questions for the following discussion.

About the speaker

Dr Evins’ research group has pioneered the use of machine learning algorithms as ‘surrogate models’ for detailed engineering simulations of building energy use, achieving huge improvements in speed and usability. Models that provide fast approximations using machine learning can be used in online dashboards to explore complex engineering design problems in an interactive manner, revolutionising the role of such tools in the building design process. He also works on the application of machine learning algorithms directly to data about buildings, from IoT sensors, smart meters and thermostats up to city-wide catalogues of the building stock. Prior to starting his research group in Canada, he worked at Empa / ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Buro Happold Ltd in London, where he competed and Engineering Doctorate with the Systems Centre (now part of the Engineering Systems Design and Innovation (esdi.ac.uk) research group) at the University of Bristol. He is back in Bristol as a 'Next Generation' Visiting Researcher, see here for details.