Grant: Alliance Grants

The goal of this partnership between École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS), and Distech Controls Inc. is to develop, adapt and improve artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for building occupancy analysis. In order to expand its building management solutions, and optimize the ratio of energy/comfort in buildings, Distech must add more intelligence in its solutions. Principal Investigator (PI) professor Pedersoli and Co-PI professor Granger with their team at ÉTS have a strong expertise in deep learning (DL) for computer vision applications. In this project, together with their collaborators and research group, they will develop innovative and cost-effective AI solutions for building automation control. In particular, this partnership will help Distech to optimize different tasks that are required to control a building, such as room ventilation, heating and illumination. For instance, by knowing the number of people that are present in a room (in a precise, not expensive and privacy-preserving way), the ventilation can be optimally adjusted. Given the actual external weather conditions, the room temperature could be better controlled with lower energy consumption. In the same way, by knowing the reason for people gathering in a room, natural or artificial illumination can be automatically selected. All these advanced and automated controls will improve comfort for end users without compromising their privacy, and providing consistent energy savings. The investigators and their team at ÉTS have a large experience on Deep Learning models with multimodal data, reduced computation, reduced supervision and adaptive models. This knowledge and expertise will allow Distech to develop innovative state-of-the-art occupancy management solutions. On the other side, the investigators will also have the opportunity to resolve real-world problems, and find innovative solutions.