Cognitive Buildings @ IBM Research - Ireland - overview
Cogntive Buildings
At IBM Research - Ireland our Cognitive IoT team is combining IoT technology, machine learning, reasoning and augmented reality, to help the humans who design, operate, maintain, and live and work in buildings.
The number of IoT devices in buildings is rapidly increasing alongside new requirements for flexible operation of climate, lighting, and other energy control systems. Cognitive buildings are able to autonomously integrate IoT devices and learn system and user behavior. And they have evolved to actively learn and adapt, making them aware of their own energy performance, and balance it with the comfort of its occupants.
A truly cognitive building can manage all the devices and system, utilize all data (including unstructured data), to learn how the buildings are utilised, how they perform in relation to end user comfort levels, how the buildings and spaces utilise energy, along with the health of the assets within them.
IBM Cognitive Building solution enriches building and asset management solutions with the newest Cognitive IoT and IBM Research technologies to deliver a Cognitive Buildings solution that benefits the operators and occupants of large building portfolios.
In Ireland, we are scaling this cognitive building vision to a new level of cognitive operations for large groups of buildings or campuses. Our latest demo builds on IBM’s Watson IoT platform to create eight cognitive IoT use cases with several buildings, including a datacenter at the IBM Technology Campus in Dublin, Ireland – a rich test environment with more than 3,000 sensors. These use cases (pictured above) show how cognitive operations solutions will drive predictive maintenance and integrate new immersive virtual and augmented reality interfaces.
For example:
My Cognitive Campus can make use of a Building Information Model (BIM) model for many different things from visualizing sensor data distributions to locating assets and for virtual reality and augmented reality. The interface has speech support and you can ask it for room locations, sensor readings and it recently supports indoor door to door path finding. Data from sensors is integrated via the Watson IoT platform and weather data from Weather Company. It can optionally also analyses occupancy from presence insights. The data is stored and analyzed on Bluemix. Modern machine-learning frameworks such as Spark permitting high scalability. Links to Maximo enable messaging to operators as well as work order management to fix issues.
Cognitive Campus Video: