Arsalan Heydarian

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Virginia

The increasing adoption of electric scooters (e-scooters) in urban areas has coincided with a rise in traffic accidents and injuries, largely due to their small wheels, lack of suspension, and sensitivity to uneven surfaces. While deep learning-based object detection has been widely used to improve automobile safety, its application for e-scooter o...

In the era of growing interest in healthy buildings and smart homes, the importance of sustainable, health conscious indoor environments is paramount. Smart tools, especially VOC sensors, are crucial for monitoring indoor air quality, yet interpreting signals from various VOC sources remains challenging. A promising approach involves understanding...

E-scooters have become a more dominant mode of transport in recent years. However, the rise in their usage has been accompanied by an increase in injuries, affecting the trust and perceived safety of both users and non-users. Artificial intelligence (AI), as a cutting-edge and widely applied technology, has demonstrated potential to enhance transpo...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that the number of bicyclist fatalities has increased by more than 35% since 2010. One of the main reasons associated with cyclists’ crashes is the adverse effect of drivers’ cognitive distractions. However, very limited studies have evaluated the impact of cyclists’ cognitive distraction...

Virtual reality (VR) simulation offers a proactive, cost effective, immersive, and low risk platform for studying pedestrian safety. Within immersive virtual environments (IVEs), existing and alternative design conditions and intelligent transportation systems (ITS) technologies can be directly compared, prior to real-world implementation, to asses...

As micromobility devices such as e-scooters gain global popularity, emergency departments around the world have observed a rising trend in related injuries. However, the majority of current research on e-scooter safety relies heavily on surveys, news reports, and data from vendors, with a noticeable scarcity of naturalistic studies examining the ef...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported that the number of bicyclist fatalities has increased by more than 35% since 2010. One of the main reasons associated with cyclists' crashes is the adverse effect of high cognitive load due to distractions. However, very limited studies have evaluated the impact of secondary tasks on cogni...

Recent advancements of virtual reality (VR) technology (such as the HTC Vive or Oculus Quest) have opened the door for lower cost and lower risk methods to study pedestrians' behavior and perception of safety, offering a higher degree of data resolution and level of realism compared to previous pedestrian simulators. This research aims to address t...

Understanding cyclist behaviors and preferences is critical to improve safety and increase mode share. However, real-world cycling data is scarce and on-road testing presents safety concerns. This study presents a novel way of studying cyclists’ perceptions of bicycle infrastructure design alternatives using immersive virtual environments modeled a...

As IoT devices become cheaper, smaller, and more ubiquitously deployed, they can reveal more information than their intended design and threaten user privacy. Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) sensors previously installed for energy savings and indoor health monitoring have emerged as an avenue to infer sensitive occupant information. For example,...

As IoT devices become cheaper, smaller, and more ubiquitously deployed, they can reveal more information than their intended design and threaten user privacy. Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) sensors previously installed for energy savings and indoor health monitoring have emerged as an avenue to infer sensitive occupant information. For example,...

The integration of human-centric approaches has gained more attention recently due to more automated systems being introduced into our built environments (buildings, roads, vehicles, etc.), which requires a correct understanding of how humans perceive such systems and respond to them. This paper introduces an Immersive Virtual Environment-based met...

Building management systems tout numerous benefits, such as energy efficiency and occupant comfort but rely on vast amounts of data from various sensors. Advancements in machine learning algorithms make it possible to extract personal information about occupants and their activities beyond the intended design of a non-intrusive sensor. However, occ...

Building management systems tout numerous benefits, such as energy efficiency and occupant comfort but rely on vast amounts of data from various sensors. Advancements in machine learning algorithms make it possible to extract personal information about occupants and their activities beyond the intended design of a non-intrusive sensor. However, occ...

Data collection through the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, or smart devices, in commercial buildings enables possibilities for increased convenience and energy efficiency. However, such benefits face a large perceptual challenge when being implemented in practice, due to the different ways occupants working in the buildings understand and trust...

Building management systems tout numerous benefits, such as energy efficiency and occupant comfort but rely on vast amounts of data from various sensors. Advancements in machine learning algorithms make it possible to extract personal information about occupants and their activities beyond the intended design of a non-intrusive sensor. However, occ...

Human-Building Interaction (HBI) is a convergent field that represents the growing complexities of the dynamic interplay between human experience and intelligence within built environments. This paper provides core definitions, research dimensions, and an overall vision for the future of HBI as developed through consensus among 25 interdisciplinary...

Living labs have been established across different countries to evaluate how the interaction between humans and buildings can be optimized to improve comfort, health, and energy savings. However, existing living labs can be too project-specific, not scalable, and inflexible for comparison against other labs. Furthermore, the lack of transparency in...

Sustainable buildings are designed to reduce energy use and other environmental impacts and to provide indoor environmental conditions that maximize well-being and satisfaction among building occupants. However, occupants' comfort in and satisfaction with such buildings has been inconsistent. Evidence indicates occupants' expectations of indoor bui...

Recent studies have pointed out the importance of mitigating drivers' stress and negative emotions. These studies show that certain road objects such as big vehicles might be associated with higher stress levels based on drivers' subjective stress measures. Additionally, research shows strong correlations between drivers' stress levels and increase...

The integration of human-centric approaches has gained more attention recently due to more automated systems being introduced into our built environments (buildings, roads, vehicles, etc.), which requires a correct understanding of how humans perceive such systems and respond to them. This paper introduces an Immersive Virtual Environment-based met...

Occupants play a key role in determining final building energy consumption. Empirical evidence must support occupants' modelling. Experiments on human responses to Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) are usually performed in test rooms or as in-field monitoring. Between these two approaches, living laboratories, often abbreviated as living labs, rep...

This paper seeks to address ten questions that explore the burgeoning field of Human-Building Interaction (HBI), an interdisciplinary field that represents the next frontier in convergent research and innovation to enable the dynamic interplay of human and building interactional intelligence. The field of HBI builds on several existing efforts in h...

Injuries and fatalities for vulnerable road users, especially bicyclists and pedestrians, are on the rise. To better inform design for vulnerable road users, we need to evaluate how bicyclist and pedestrian behavior and physiological states change in different roadway design and contextual settings. Previous research highlights the advantages of us...

Naturalistic driving data (NDD) can help understand drivers’ reactions to each driving scenario and provide personalized context to driving behavior. However, NDD requires a high amount of manual labor to label certain driver’s state and behavioral patterns. Unsupervised analysis of NDD can be used to automatically detect different patterns from th...

Recent reports indicate that cyclist fatalities are rising. Unlike automobile driver crash and safety studies, there is very limited information and data on how different environmental or design features impact cyclists’ behaviors, attention, and awareness. Real world studies evaluating cyclist behavior are limited due to their inherent safety risk...

Dynamic models of occupancy patterns have shown to be effective in optimizing building-systems operations. Previous research has relied on CO2 sensors and vision-based techniques to determine occupancy patterns. Vision-based techniques provide highly accurate information; however, they are very intrusive. Therefore, motion or CO2 sensors are more w...

Recent studies have pointed out the importance of mitigating drivers stress and negative emotions. These studies show that certain road objects such as big vehicles might be associated with higher stress levels based on drivers subjective stress measures. Additionally, research shows strong correlations between drivers stress levels and increased h...

Understanding and mitigating drivers' negative emotions, stress levels, and anxiety is of high importance for decreasing accident rates, enhancing road safety, and providing a healthy lifestyle to the community of drivers. While detecting drivers' stress and negative emotions can significantly help with this goal, understanding what might be associ...

Dynamic models of occupancy patterns have shown to be effective in optimizing building-systems operations. Previous research has relied on CO$_2$ sensors and vision-based techniques to determine occupancy patterns. Vision-based techniques provide highly accurate information; however, they are very intrusive. Therefore, motion or CO$_2$ sensors are...

Analyzing the impact of the environment on drivers' stress level and workload is of high importance for designing human-centered driver-vehicle interaction systems and to ultimately help build a safer driving experience. However, driver's state, including stress level and workload, are psychological constructs that cannot be measured on their own a...

As a healthier and more sustainable way of mobility, cycling has been advocated by literature and policy. However, current trends in bicyclist crash fatalities suggest deficiencies in current roadway design in protecting these vulnerable road users. The lack of cycling data is a common challenge for studying bicyclists' safety, behavior, and comfor...

Analyzing the impact of the environment on drivers’ stress level and workload is of high importance for designing human-centered driver-vehicle interaction systems and to ultimately help build a safer driving experience. However, driver’s state, including stress level and workload, are latent variables that cannot be measured on their own and shoul...

Injuries and fatalities for vulnerable road users, especially bicyclists and pedestrians, are on the rise. To better inform design for vulnerable road users, we need to conduct more studies to evaluate how bicyclist and pedestrian behavior and physiological states change in different roadway designs and contextual settings. Previous research highli...

This chapters in this book highlight the breadth of smart water technologies and applications. From the use of classical machine learning and data transformation methods for process improvement, to data management and assimilation in models for better monitoring control, a selection of these chapters describes the acquisition and preparation of dat...

Naturalistic driving data (NDD) can help understand drivers' reactions to each driving scenario and provide personalized context to driving behavior. However, NDD requires a high amount of manual labor to label certain driver's state and behavioral patterns. Unsupervised analysis of NDD can be used to automatically detect different patterns from th...

Occupants’ comfort perception affects building energy consumptions. To improve the understanding of human comfort, which is crucial to reduce energy demand, laboratory experiments with humans in controlled environments (test rooms) are fundamental, but their potential also depends on the characteristic of each research facility. Nowadays, there is...

This project seeks to investigate the under addressed issue of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and the impacts these factors can have on human health. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has once again brought to the forefront the importance of maintaining a healthy indoor environment. Specifically, the improvement of indoor air flow has shown to reduc...

Studies have shown that environmental factors affect driving behaviors. For instance, weather conditions and the presence of a passenger have been shown to significantly affect the speed of the driver. As one of the important measures of driving behavior is the gaze and head movements of the driver, such metrics can be potentially used towards unde...

Recent reports indicate that cyclist fatalities are rising. Unlike automobile driver crash and safety studies, there is very limited information and data on how different environmental or design features impact cyclists’ behaviors, attention, and awareness. Real world studies evaluating cyclist behavior are limited due to their inherent safety risk...

Although we extensively use routing services in our daily commutes, such systems are yet to be personalized around the user. It often happens that different routes are close in their estimated time of arrival (ETA) while being very different in how they affect the driver’s states. Using traces of a user’s physiological measures, different candidate...

Integrating driver, in-cabin, and outside environment's contextual cues into the vehicle's decision making is the centerpiece of semi-automated vehicle safety. Multiple systems have been developed for providing context to the vehicle, which often rely on video streams capturing drivers' physical and environmental states. While video streams are a r...

Effective shared autonomy requires a clear understanding of driver’s behavior, which is governed by multiple psychophysiological and environmental variables. Disentangling this intricate web of interactions requires understanding the driver’s state and behaviors in different real-world scenarios, longitudinally. Naturalistic Driving Studies (NDS) h...

Injuries and fatalities for vulnerable road users, especially bicyclists and pedestrians, are on the rise. To better inform design for vulnerable road users, we need to conduct more studies to evaluate how bicyclist and pedestrian behavior and physiological states change in different roadway designs and contextual settings. Previous research highli...

Flooding in coastal cities is increasing due to climate change and sea-level rise, stressing the traditional stormwater systems these communities rely on. Automated real-time control (RTC) of these systems can improve performance, and creating control policies for smart stormwater systems is an active area of study. This research explores reinforce...

Previous studies suggest that variation in driver's states, such as being under stress, can degrade drivers' performance. Moreover, different drivers may have varying behaviors and reactions in different road conditions and environments (contexts). Thus, personalized driver models given different contextual settings can assist in better predicting...

Previous studies suggest that variation in driver’s states, such as being under stress, can degrade drivers’ performance. Moreover, different drivers may have varying behaviors and reactions in different road conditions and environments (contexts). Thus, personalized driver models given different contextual settings can assist in better predicting...

Studies have indicated that emotions can significantly be influenced by environmental factors; these factors can also significantly influence driver’s emotional state and, accordingly, driving behavior. Furthermore, as the demand for autonomous vehicles is expected to significantly increase within the next decade, a proper understanding of the driv...

With advances in Building Information Modeling (BIM), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have many potential applications in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. However, the AEC industry, relative to other industries, has been slow in adopting AR/VR technologies, partly due to lack of feasibilit...

Occupant behavior has a significant impact on building systems’ operations and efficiency. As a result, several innovative approaches have been introduced to quantify the dynamics of occupants within indoor environments, such as interactions with different building systems and the impact of various feedback and interventions to reduce the building...

With advances in Building Information Modeling (BIM), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have many potential applications in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. However, the AEC industry, relative to other industries, has been slow in adopting AR/VR technologies, partly due to lack of feasibilit...

With advances in Building Information Modeling (BIM), Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have many potential applications in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. However, the AEC industry, relative to other industries, has been slow in adopting AR/VR technologies, partly due to lack of feasibilit...

Visualization has shown to significantly assist communication and decision making within the architecture, engineering, construction, and operation (AECO) industry. The current visualization techniques do not incorporate the building spatial context due to lack of interaction and immersiveness. Extracting and visualizing building data are mainly fo...

Collecting and analyzing psychological and environmental data to build an occupant behavior model and pairing them with targeted interventions can result in increased occupant energy efficiency, productivity, and well-being. Specifically, lighting has been shown to drastically influence these factors in occupants; however, lighting’s effects on occ...

Office buildings, schools, stores, hotels, restaurants and other commercial, and institutional buildings generate significant amounts of waste. While buildings are becoming increasingly aware of their energy and water usage, the capability to track waste and material use with the same ease has remained beyond the reach of most building facilities m...

One of the main desired qualities of an efficient project management in the construction industry is the ability to visualize a construction project in 2D drawings and execute them accurately and efficiently on-site. However, there are several types of delays that significantly influence project durations, often resulting from misunderstanding and...

In this paper, a systematic approach is presented to (1) collect end-user lighting-related behavior by using immersive virtual environments (IVEs) as an experimental tool, (2) integrate the collected data with building performance simulation (BPS) tools in order to translate behavioral information into quantitative measures (i.e., preferred lux lev...

With the recent advancements in the field of virtual reality, occupants can now be immersed into virtual built environments, where they have the ability to visualize and interact with the environment. Researchers also have the ability to collect and observe various behavioural choices impacting performance of built environments (e.g. shading contro...

Occupant behaviour and their interactions with building systems could significantly influence energy consumption in buildings. Studies suggest “default setting” techniques could be used as intervention strategies as people's preferences are dramatically influenced by minor variations in settings. With the goal to reduce lighting-related energy cons...

Lighting systems account for approximately 50–70% of the total electricity consumption in commercial buildings. Previous research has shown that occupant behavior and their interactions with building systems significantly influence the total energy consumption in buildings. Yet neither architects/engineers design user-centered buildings that take i...

Increasing the use of natural light in commercial buildings could save up to 50 percent in energy consumption. Previous research has shown that there is a direct connection between occupant behavior and the energy consumed in a building. Experimental studies suggest occupants are less likely to adjust the shades if the available lighting is within...

Previous research has shown occupants' behavior and interactions with building systems and components have a significant impact on the total energy consumption of buildings. Incorporating occupant requirements to the design process could result in better operations, and therefore, improve the total energy consumption of buildings. Currently, buildi...

Buildings consume enormous amounts of our nation’s total energy use (38 %). Previous work showed that occupant actions and behaviors have significant impacts (more than 40 %) on building energy demand. Our main goal is to transform buildings into interactive living spaces that communicate with their occupants via agents and influence the way the oc...

Studies have shown that occupant behavior has a significant impact on a building's overall performance and energy consumption. The objective of this study is to understand occupants' lighting-use behavior by investigating the influence of manual and semi-automatic control systems on lighting-use in a single-occupancy office space. 114 participants...

Buildings and their systems are primarily designed based on several assumptions about end-users' requirements and needs, which in many cases are incomplete and result in inefficiencies during operation phases of buildings. With advancements in fields of augmented and virtual reality, designers and engineers have now the opportunity to collect infor...

This paper presents research on the development of multi- agent systems (MAS) for integrated and performance driven architectural design. It presents the development of a simulation framework that bridges architecture and engineering, through a series of multi-agent based experiments. The research is motivated to combine multiple design agencies in...

Recent studies have focused on increasing energy efficiency in commercial buildings through technological means (e.g., efficient HVAC systems, sensors and sensing systems). However, most studies underestimate the impact of occupants' behavioural choices. Lighting systems account for approximately a fifth of the total electricity consumption in the...

This research prefaces the need for engaging with end-users in early stages of design as means to achieve higher performing designs with an increased certainty for end-user satisfaction. While the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) community has previously used virtual reality, the primary use has been for coordination and visualizat...

This research prefaces the need for engaging with end-users in early stages of design as means to achieve higher performing designs with an increased certainty for end-user satisfaction. While the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) community has previously used virtual reality, the primary use has been for coordination and visualizat...

Making significant progress towards sustainable energy use requires a broad shift in how buildings are designed, used and operated. Our research focuses on understanding and quantifying the impact of design on human's energy related activities and behavior in buildings and using the acquired knowledge in building operations.

Video recordings of earthmoving construction operations provide understandable data that can be used for benchmarking and analyzing their performance. These recordings further support project managers to take corrective actions on performance deviations and in turn improve operational efficiency. Despite these benefits, manual stopwatch studies of...

This paper presents an automated and real-time algorithm for recognition and 2D tracking of construction workers and equipment from site video streams. In recent years, several research studies have proposed semi-automated vision-based methods for tracking of construction workers and equipment. Nonetheless, there is still a need for automated initi...

Benchmarking and monitoring are critical steps toward improving operational efficiency of earthmoving equipment and minimizing their environmental impacts. Despite the importance, the relationship between operational efficiency and total pollutant emissions of these operations has not been fully understood. To establish such relationship and find w...

Video recording of construction operations provides an understandable data that could be used to analyze and improve construction performance. Despite the benefits, manual stopwatch study of previously recorded videos can be labor- intensive, may suffer from biases of the observers, and impractical after substantial period of observations. To addre...

As buildings and infrastructure are becoming more energy efficient, reducing and mitigating construction-phase carbon footprint and embodied carbon is getting more attention. Government agencies are forming incentive-based regulations on controlling these impacts and expressing control of carbon footprints as principle dynamic goals in projects. Th...