“My proposed topic is focused on finding ways that buildings can encourage an active lifestyle for people. My experience as an elite athlete for seven years and as a personal trainer has shown me the importance of a healthy lifestyle.
In my research trainee position with Professor Alstan Jakubiec I work on a pilot study to find an effective way of coding people’s activities in buildings for the purpose of assessing the effect of the building on the health and wellbeing of the occupants. From May 2022 – Sept 2022, I will be working with an image-based dataset, learning coding/labeling techniques, utilizing machine learning classification tools & language processing tools, and developing data management techniques to form subjective survey data.
This is just the beginning of my journey in research. I am learning how research can help architects make informed decisions that can make buildings more effective in helping their inhabitants. Conducting new research breathes new life into a mature discipline.”
“I’m studying material use in new construction in cities, focusing on low-rise, high-density residential buildings. This work is motivated by simultaneous crises in housing availability and environmental degradation partly due to resource overuse. It forms part of an ongoing project in Professor Shoshanna Saxe’s group to identify existing options for building and city design that reduce material demand while maintaining function. Presently, data available in this field is very poor, limiting possible studies. My work focuses on developing the world’s first image-based infrastructure material analysis data set, with over a hundred buildings measured thus far.”
My role includes studying building drawings, completing material take offs, contributing to building the material use database and supporting academic paper writing. I develop detailed models from drawings of real buildings to facilitate material quantification and embodied GHG assessment. This work is done in Masterformat and Uniformat to categorize building elements consistently.
Aldrick’s research advances housing design and relevant policies to build homes with less embodied carbon. His research will quantify the influence on embodied carbon of built form and material selection and will quantify the power to change carbon emissions through design choices. The research will be Toronto focused but the findings will have broad application, in particular to locations that build using similar styles and techniques (e.g., Eastern Canada and Northern US). Aldrick is a fourth-year PhD candidate with the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering. He finds interest in Industrial Ecology tools including Life Cycle Assessment and Material Flow Analysis, and he hopes to apply these methods to help solve problems related to zero-carbon buildings and circularity in the construction sector.
As part of this fellowship, Ian will work with colleagues across U of T to identify and develop the conceptual framework to describe the health impacts of climate change and climate actions across the Greater Toronto Area. The outcome will identify a set of potential indicators that can be used to identify risks and opportunities for health, especially among communities who are climate and health vulnerable, in order to better be able to develop a broad coalition of stakeholders to support climate positive actions that can enable greater resilience and inclusive societies within a thriving ecosystem.
This project aims to develop a novel and scalable building energy modelling and optimal control framework by using modern AI techniques to optimize campus building HVAC operations and transform campus buildings into grid-interactive smart buildings.
Ensuring that the construction associated with much-needed new buildings and infrastructure consumes resources within the carrying capacity of the planet.
Investigating how a modelling-based approach to energy transitions can support more equitable participation and just decision making for building retrofits.
