Smart Campus Summit: Beyond the Dashboard

Overview

Infrastructure Properties and Planning (IPP) hosted the first ever Smart Campus Summit: Beyond the Dashboard on October 2-4, 2017. 

The event included a dinner presentation from Mike Newman, one of the creators of BACnet; a keynote address by Steve Ray from Carnegie Mellon; a threat landscape panel discussion by Cornell IT Security; a panel discussion by vendors like Microsoft and IBM, ect; a breakout done by business professionals on what they would like to see from IT for their smart campus; and sessions conducted by our Cornell and Ivy Plus peers.

Over 50 higher education IT professionals and building automation corporate professionals from 13 colleges and universities and 7 businesses gathered together for an exciting, informative conference.

**This event was co-sponsored by IPP and Cornell Information Technology

Additional Info:

Cornell University Infrastructure Properties and Planning is proud to be hosting a Smart Campus Summit - Beyond the Dashboard this fall for all of our Higher Ed friends and colleagues for us to share our collective best practices, learn about what is being expected of us in the near future, and collaborate on how we can get all of us to a “smart campus.”  

Campuses like ours present unique challenges and opportunities for our Building Automation Systems (BAS) and facilities management professionals.  We have a wide variety of facilities, both in age and occupancy, multiple generations of building automation equipment, strict and demanding controls for research, and persistent pressure to keep budgets in check.  On the plus side, we also have well-engaged students, faculty, and staff that are more than willing to be pro-active in environmental conservation initiatives.  They are much more inclined to be “connected” both with their peers and their environment than ever before.  We are also much more open to collaboration than what is found in commercial real estate, because while at some level colleges and universities are competing for students, we in the trenches are battling the forces of energy cost, infrastructure decay, an explosion of interconnected and dependent devices, and an avalanche of data.

All of us are on a similar journey growing in sophistication; getting our metering and BAS system network connected; adopting standard protocols; supporting multiple vendors; centralized alarm management and data archiving; naming conventions and classification; fault detection and diagnostics; work order and maintenance management integration; system performance and occupancy based predictive analytics.  Where is your campus on this scale? All of us have some realtime or near realtime schematics and dashboards, some of them are system or metric specific and relatively few are campus-wide.  Most of the ones that we have seen are about what’s going on now, used to dig deeper into alarm conditions and miscreant behavior.  What are your most successful realtime schematics and dashboards? All of us are no doubt inundated with offers of the latest and greatest cloud based analytics, just as we are about the onslaught of Internet of Things (IoT) revolution.  None of those will replace the local expertise, the legacy knowledge, and know how necessary to balance the recommendations generated by these external systems and the hard reality of available funds and personnel.  None of those systems can function without carefully orchestrated and maintained data feeds.  What is your experience with these vendors and their tools?

What is Beyond the Dashboard? The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to usher in "smarter" buildings by more pervasive networks of sensors that are tailored to specific types of occupants.  By providing their personal data to the BAS, they are expecting the BAS to respond to them just as personally.  What individual occupant current and projected activity data does your facility need to provide better service? There is a growing risk of cyber attacks to building and access controls systems in our facilities that threaten the safety of the occupants, the teaching environment, and the research being performed.  How are you evaluating the risk to your facilities, finding the resources to mitigate them, and are you prepared for what to do if it happens?

There are lots of tools for weather models and building models, what about people models? Some dashboard companies provide engagement services, reaching out to occupants on social media platforms to help educate them on their impact on the environment.  How are these systems working on your campus?  Are the engagement ra es, and assuming the people so engaged are appropriately changing their behavior, saving enough energy to justify the cost of these services? What are the feedback communications tools you already have in place for when the building fails to meet demand?  Automated demand response systems are being built now that will take into account both the price and availability of energy resources and adjust the building performance accordingly, those might curtail or prevent some kinds of activity from being performed.

We will be sharing our own history, lessons learned, and future direction, and we would like to hear yours!