Table 1.
Sample research questions related to human, building, and technology aspects of HBI.
| Human experiences, performance, and well-being |
| How can built environments augment user performance (such as productivity or safety)? |
| What are the effects of HBI on joint human-automation performance? |
| How do built environments’ design and operations passively and/or actively impact occupants’ health and well-being? |
| How can interfaces in the built environment actively “nudge” occupants towards adopting changes for healthier behavior, and how can “nudging” be converted to active awareness and participation in positive actions among the occupants? |
| How can psychological, social, and economic theories help building systems and AI to enhance occupant experience, performance, and well-being? |
| What role does AI play in addition to humans in making decisions about building operations (e.g., should the AI system be in charge based on predetermined human requirements or should the human be in charge based on AI suggestions?) |
| How might built environments help humans, families, and organizations achieve their goals? |
| Building design and operations |
| What is the difference between designing non-intelligent buildings vs. intelligent ones that are aware and proactively cater to the needs of their occupants? |
| What approaches could be used to perform cognitive-grounded analyses of the collaborative interactions between humans and intelligent buildings equipped with sensing, inferring, and communication abilities? |
| How might we design spaces that are intuitive to navigate for humans with different physical and cognitive abilities both in the day-to-day and emergency scenarios (e.g., to help their occupants to shelter during an active shooter incident)? |
| How could natural elements be seamlessly integrated into the building design process to enhance the well-being of different populations over time? |
| How can AI-driven adaptations of built features be programmed to respond to and anticipate occupants’ short- or long-term needs? |
| What are the opportunities and challenges for incorporating automated operational adaptations in existing buildings vs. building intelligent adaptation methods into new designs? |
| To what degree does enabling occupant awareness and interactivity in built environments promote low-energy and low-carbon building operations? |
| Sensing, inference, and awareness |
| What are optimal modalities and configurations of sensors that result in high accuracy and robust data collection and inference in a privacy-preserving and unbiased manner? |
| What sensor modalities are needed to be added to the mix of Internet of Things (IoT) devices to facilitate more ambitious goals in the HBI field? |
| Given the combination of fixed and dynamic sensors within the built environment, with a varying set of IoT devices used by occupants, how can a sensor fusion system best normalize the data features to support higher-level functionality such as activity recognition? |
| How could buildings infer and quantify each specific occupant’s habits, experiences, and social interactions through the emerging sensing technologies? |
| How could a general graph of human activities be generated and populated given myriads of sensor fusion results from various building types? How could the social, temporal, and semi-hierarchical nature of the relations between human activities be represented? |
| What representations could be used to develop an awareness of human needs, social contexts, and environmental needs so that levels of compliance to those goals can be estimated? How can recommender systems be developed to automate the suggestion of optimal modifications to increase compliance? |