Clayton MillerNational University of Singapore | NUS · Department of the Built Environment
Clayton Miller
Dr. sc. ETH
Making links between the building science and data science communities!
About
175
Publications
125,601
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Introduction
Dr. Clayton Miller is an Associate Professor at NUS in the BUDS Lab. He holds a Doctor of Sciences (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) from the ETH Zürich, an MSc. (Building) from the National University of Singapore (NUS), and a BSc./Masters of Architectural Engineering (MAE) from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln (UNL).
Additional affiliations
October 2016 - April 2017
October 2012 - October 2016
October 2012 - October 2016
Education
November 2012 - October 2016
July 2009 - November 2011
August 2006 - May 2007
Publications
Publications (175)
Simulation model calibration has been long identified as a key means of reconciling the consumption and efficiency characteristics of buildings. A key step in this process is the creation of the actual diversity factor profiles for occupancy and various energy end uses such as lighting, plug-loads, and HVAC. Creation of these model inputs is conven...
We present an approach for rapidly assessing the per-formance of early design stage building information models (BIM) from both the building and urban sys-tems scale. This effort builds upon two previously de-veloped tools, the Design Performance Viewer (DPV) and the CitySim urban simulation engine. It couples them to produce a more informed model....
The amount of sensor data generated by modern building systems is growing rapidly. Automatically discovering the structure of diurnal patterns in this data supports implementation of building commissioning, fault detection and retrofit analysis techniques. Additionally, these data are crucial to informing design professionals about the efficacy of...
Building retrofit analysis of buildings in Switzerland traditionally relies on expert heuristics and best practices. These processes are not often supplemented by data or model-driven techniques that would enhance the accuracy and ability to quantify the impact of innovative technologies. We present a process of calibrated building energy model (BE...
Building performance research using various informatics techniques has progressed extensively in the last twenty years by advancing the fields of automated fault detection and diagnostics (AFDD), commissioning, data mining, and visualization for commercial buildings. Despite this effort, it has been difficult to understand the effectiveness of diff...
Humans can play a more active role in improving their comfort in the built environment if given the right information at the right place and time. This paper outlines the use of Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAI) implemented in the context of the built environment to provide information that helps humans minimize the impact of heat and noi...
This study presents a comprehensive dataset capturing indoor environmental parameters, physiological responses, and subjective perceptions across three global cities. Utilizing wearable sensors, including smart eyeglasses, and a modified Cozie app, environmental and physiological data were collected, along with pre-screening, onboarding, and recurr...
The increasing availability of urban-scale, open-access datasets can support decision-making in urban planning, in particular in relation to climate resilience and climate change mitigation. Such data-driven initiatives however often neglect the central role of urban dwellers, whose activities create the demand for energy and mobility in urban area...
The indoor environment significantly impacts human health and well-being; enhancing health and reducing energy consumption in these settings is a central research focus. With the advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), recommendation systems and reinforcement learning (RL) have emerged as promising approaches to induce behavi...
The concept of digital twins has attracted significant attention across various domains, particularly within the built environment. However, there is a sheer volume of definitions and the terminological consensus remains out of reach. The lack of a universally accepted definition leads to ambiguities in their conceptualization and implementation, a...
The widespread availability of open datasets in cities is transforming the way urban energy systems are planned, simulated, and visualized. In this paper, a cross-scale approach is pursued to better understand the reciprocal effects between building energy performance, the urban climate, and urban dwellers’ indoor and outdoor thermal comfort. On th...
It’s not just the models, techniques, or technologies that improve building performance; the digital skills of built environment professionals also play a significant part. The deluge of data from buildings, intelligent systems, and simulation tools is well-documented, and like other domains, building design, construction, and operations profession...
This study presents a comprehensive dataset capturing indoor environmental parameters, physiological responses, and subjective perceptions across three global cities. Utilizing wearable sensors, including smart eyeglasses, and a modified Cozie app, environmental and physiological data were collected, along with pre-screening, onboarding, and recurr...
With the increasing stock of ageing infrastructure and resource constraints in Singapore, related risks and carbon emissions can be mitigated through long-term resilience planning, automated building inspection, and effective maintenance. Sustainable actions are needed to maintain Singapore's ageing infrastructure. Hence, a state-of-the-art control...
This paper presents an innovative approach to addressing the prevalent challenge of simulation uncertainty in urban building energy modeling (UBEM), focusing on accurately determining occupant-related input parameters. Traditional UBEM methods typically rely on standard schedules to create archetype models, which often fail to reflect the variabili...
This research examines the interplay of outdoor thermal comfort, walkability, and three-dimensional geospatial landscape within cities. Employing advanced data collection methods, including smart wearables and street view imagery (SVI), we conduct a comprehensive exploration of integrating heterogeneous sensor data and computer vision in an urban d...
It's not just the models, techniques, or technologies that improve building performance; the digital skills of built environment professionals also play a significant part. The deluge of data from buildings, intelligent systems, and simulation tools is well-documented, and like other domains, building design, construction, and operations profession...
Energy demand from the built environment is among the most important contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. One promising way to curtail these emissions is through innovative energy management systems (EMS’s). These systems often rely on access to real-world demand data, which remains elusive in practice. Even when available, energy demand data...
Building operational energy alone accounts for 28% of global carbon emissions. A sustainable building operation promises enormous savings, especially under the increasing concern of climate change and the rising trends of the digitalization and electrification of buildings. Intelligent control strategies play a crucial role in building systems and...
This paper describes a dataset collected by infrared thermography, a non-contact, non-intrusive technique to acquire data and analyze the built environment in various aspects. While most studies focus on the city and building scales, an observatory installed on a rooftop provides high temporal and spatial resolution observations with dynamic intera...
The widespread availability of open datasets in urban areas is transforming how urban energy systems are planned, simulated, and visualized. Urban energy models, however, require an understanding of urban dwellers, as their activities create the demands for energy in buildings. In this paper, we explore using campus-scale Wi-Fi data to identify typ...
Hybrid working strategies have become, and will continue to be, the norm for many offices. This raises two considerations: newly unoccupied spaces needlessly consume energy, and the occupied spaces need to be effectively used to facilitate meaningful interactions and create a positive, sustainable work culture. This work aims to determine when spon...
This paper resulted from several questions discussed between its human authors shortly after the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT:
Can a language model, trained on an unimaginably vast database, be able to resolve fundamental data inference and data-driven forecasting problems which have been ’typical’ research fare in the building science domain?...
Collecting feedback from people in indoor and outdoor environments is traditionally challenging and complex to achieve in a reliable, longitudinal, and non-intrusive way. This paper introduces Cozie Apple, an open-source mobile and smartwatch application for iOS devices. This platform allows people to complete a watch-based micro-survey and provide...
The building sector plays a crucial role in the worldwide decarbonization effort, accounting for significant portions of energy consumption and environmental effects. However, the scarcity of open data sources is a continuous challenge for built environment researchers and practitioners. Although several efforts have been made to consolidate existi...
Occupant-centric controls (OCC) and operations have emerged as a key concept in shifting the focus from conventional building- (or better system-) centric operations to a more occupant-centric approach. Despite the potential of OCC to meet occupants’ demands and bridge buildings’ energy performance gap, its implementation in real-world settings has...
The holistic management of a building requires data from heterogeneous sources such as building management systems (BMS), Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor networks, and building information models. Data interoperability is a key component to eliminate silos of information, and using semantic web technologies like the BRICK schema, an effort to stand...
Building energy prediction and management has become increasingly important in recent decades, driven by the growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the availability of more energy data. However, energy data is often collected from multiple sources and can be incomplete or inconsistent, which can hinder accurate predictions and management of...
Hybrid working strategies have become, and will continue to be, the norm for many offices. This raises two considerations: newly unoccupied spaces needlessly consume energy, and the occupied spaces need to be effectively used to facilitate meaningful interactions and create a positive, sustainable work culture. This work aims to determine when spon...
The building sector plays a crucial role in the worldwide decarbonization effort, accounting for significant portions of energy consumption and environmental effects. However, the scarcity of open data sources is a continuous challenge for built environment researchers and practitioners. Although several efforts have been made to consolidate existi...
Occupant-Centric Control and Operation (OCC) represents a transformative approach to building management, integrating sensing of indoor environmental quality, occupant presence, and occupant-building interactions. These data are then utilized to optimize both operational efficiency and occupant comfort. This paper summarizes the findings from the I...
The paper describes a dataset that was collected by infrared thermography, which is a non-contact, non-intrusive technique to collect data and analyze the built environment in various aspects. While most studies focus on the city and building scales, the rooftop observatory provides high temporal and spatial resolution observations with dynamic int...
Before 2020, the way occupants utilized the built environment had been changing slowly towards scenarios in which occupants have more choice and flexibility in where and how they work. The global COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this phenomenon rapidly through lockdowns and hybrid work arrangements. Many occupants and employers are considering keeping...
The psychrometric chart is the most common data visualization technique for the designers of thermal comfort systems worldwide. From its humble roots as means of expressing the characteristics of air in building systems design, the use of the chart has grown to include the representation of the zones of human thermal comfort according to both conve...
Conventional sidewalk studies focused on quantitative analysis of sidewalk walkability at a large scale which cannot capture the dynamic interactions between the environment and individual factors. Embracing the idea of Tech for Social Good, Urban Digital Twins seek AI-empowered approaches to bridge humans with digitally-mediated technologies to en...
Personal thermal comfort models are used to predict individual-level thermal comfort responses to inform design and control decisions of buildings to achieve optimal conditioning for improved comfort and energy efficiency. However, the development of data-driven thermal comfort models requires collecting a large amount of sensor-related measurement...
Building thermal modeling is the founding stone upon which
numerous carbon reduction strategies in the building sector are built. Yet, as of today, little to no interpretable and calibrated models founded on real-world measurements have been open-sourced. This work attempts to remedy this deficiency and renders public improved results of a recentl...
Personal thermal comfort models are a paradigm shift in predicting how building occupants perceive their thermal environment. Previous work has critical limitations related to the length of the data collected and the diversity of spaces. This paper outlines a longitudinal field study comprising 20 participants who answered Right‐Here‐Right‐Now surv...
This paper presents a digital twin of a university campus in Singapore as a demonstrator for a digital-twin enabled approach to district energy resilience. This paper focuses mainly on the development of the building energy and occupancy models in the digital twin, which are complemented by a user interface for real-time data visualization and scen...
This work presents a study on the characterization of the air-conditioning (AC) usage pattern of non-residential buildings from thermal images collected from an urban-scale infrared (IR) observatory. To achieve this first, an image processing scheme, for cleaning and extraction of the temperature time series from the thermal images is implemented....
People spend the majority of their time indoors and environmental conditions affect their perceptions, performance, health, and well-being. Buildings should, therefore, be designed and operated with the main objective of providing comfortable environments for occupants and meeting their needs. However, in practice, occupants' perceptions and sensat...
This paper studies heat fluxes from contributors and mitigators of urban heat islands using thermal images and weather data. Thermal images were collected from an observatory operating on the rooftop of a building between November 2021 and April 2022. Over the same period, an automatic weather station network was used to measure weather conditions...
Cohort Comfort Models (CCM) are introduced as a technique for creating a personalized thermal prediction for a new building occupant without the need to collect large amounts of individual comfort-related data. This approach leverages historical data collected from a sample population, who have some underlying preference similarity to the new occup...
Cities today encounter significant challenges pertaining to urbanization and population growth, resource availability, and climate change. Concurrently, unparalleled datasets are generated through Internet of Things (IoT) sensing implemented at urban, building, and personal scales that serve as a potential tool for understanding and overcoming thes...