John Eric Taylor

Georgia Institute of Technology | GT · School of Civil & Environmental Engineering

Due to population growth, climate change, and the urban heat island effect, heat exposure is becoming an important issue faced by urban built environments. Heat exposure assessment is a prerequisite for mitigation measures to reduce the impact of heat exposure. However, there is limited research on urban heat exposure assessment approaches that pro...

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...

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...

To address the severe risks imposed by air pollution, governments around the world have prioritized air quality information disclosure and alert dissemination with a goal to evoke awareness and ultimately encourage behavior changes. Daily transportation behavior not only contributes to air pollution formation but also impacts personal exposure. Pre...

Indoor navigation is difficult in large and complex navigation decision points. Helping occupants navigate more easily in these spaces is one of the important means to improve satisfaction. The navigation sign is an effective and one of the most common ways to achieve this goal. This study aims to propose a novel building information modeling based...

Our relationship with technology is constantly evolving, and how we use technology in disasters has evolved even faster. Understanding how to utilize human interactions with technology and the limitations of those interactions will be a crucial building block to contextualizing crisis data. The impact of geographic scale on behavioral change analys...

Sustainable development has become one of the major objectives in building and operating healthcare facilities, as they exert a major impact on the environment and society. It is also critically important for modern healthcare facilities to adapt to an aging population, rapid technology upgrades, and the increasing demand for quality health care. I...

Urbanization introduces the threat of increased epidemic disease transmission resulting from crowding on mass transit. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, which has directly led to over 600,000 deaths in the US as of July 2021, triggered mass social distancing policies to be enacted as a key deterrent of widespread infections. Social...

Many cities are vulnerable to disaster-related mortality and economic loss. Smart City Digital Twins can be used to facilitate disaster decision-making and influence policy, but first they must accurately capture, predict, and adapt to the city’s dynamics, including the varying pace at which changes unfold.

The Sars-CoV-2 disease (known as COVID-19) has become a global public health emergency. Researchers have been unveiling the transmission mechanisms and disclosing possible contributing factors. Studies have theorized plausible linkage mechanisms between air pollution exposure and COVID-19 infection and have divided the air pollution exposure into t...

Severe tropical cyclones impose threats on highly populated coastal urban areas, thereby, understanding and predicting human movements plays a critical role in evaluating disaster resilience of human society. However, limited research has focused on tropical cyclones and their influence on human mobility resilience. This preliminary study examined...

As energy consumption in urban areas rises to the level of being a global concern, the impact of community behavior becomes critical to assessing and managing energy consumption. Eco-feedback systems are taking advantage of data streams from advanced metering infrastructure and are being widely implemented with the goal of increasing engagement in...

Urbanization and the growth of human population are leading to increased complexities in the interactions of citizens with public spaces, creating cities that must be more responsive to community dynamics. Despite the critical need for community-based city management, current decision-making approaches are often uninformed by the collective behavio...

Recent research has underscored the potential for public green spaces to influence individual and societal health outcomes, but empirical measurements of such influences have yielded mixed results to date, with particular disagreement surrounding how access to parks ought to be defined while controlling for alternate explanations. In this paper, we...

In the last decade, crisis informatics has sought to produce and use actionable information from social media data. Although substantial progress has been made in discerning how the data can be used, there is a lack of research identifying possible inequities in that use. Previous research has shown that vulnerable populations use social media less...

Although extreme events are inevitable, the associated cost to infrastructure and human life is not. We can mitigate these costs through improving the information available to emergency responders during and after crisis events via social media. Recent research has identified a correlation between spikes of Twitter activity and the infrastructural...

We look forward to receiving great papers again building on the first two runnings of the "Smart City Digital Twins" MiniTrack at HICSS! We are expanding the scope of the MiniTrack to include innovative research being done in the areas of Smart Building Digital Twins and Smart Community Digital Twins. Follow the link below for more details and to s...

Improving urban resilience to disasters becomes well-recognized in both industry and academia, but resilience remains challenging to be operationalized, especially in the complex urban contexts. Currently, longitudinal empirical studies on measuring resilience at fine-grains of space and time are lacking. Few methods can quantify resilience at an u...

This paper was highlighted in an ASCE SmartBrief and, as such, has been made available by ASCE for free download for a limited time at the following link: https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)ME.1943-5479.0000741

Recent advances in energy technologies, policies, and practices have accelerated the global rate of improvements in energy efficiency, bringing the energy targets identified in the 2030 United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Agenda within reach. However, Target 7.3 requires this rate to double by 2030, demanding a more substantial response to...

With the rise of advanced and affordable sensors offering continuous monitoring of city infrastructure, cities are increasingly seeking to become more ‘smart’ and are adopting data-driven approaches to help meet sustainability goals. In the area of building energy efficiency, closely coupled with this effort is the prevalence of building energy ben...

Urban social and built environments collectively contribute to the health and wellbeing of citizens. Despite considerable efforts toward achieving the UN sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to improve the sustainability of the urban built environment and to create a more sustainable urban social environment, both physiological and psychological di...

Capitalizing on technology to establish smart city capacities that respond to urbanization, sustainability, and resilience challenges have gained momentum in recent years. The increased use of sensors and systems—e.g., Internet of Things (IoT)—has enabled more cohesive networks among and between human and infrastructure systems to support services...

The transportation system in urban areas plays a critical role in evacuation and resource supply during disasters. Transportation diversity, i.e., the availability and distribution of transportation modes across a community, impacts the mode complementarity, which can affect population movements and connectivity among spatial units—especially durin...

Current crisis informatics research using social media to identify human location and behavior has neglected to identify which populations may be prevented from using social media during a disaster. Unfortunately, most crisis informatics focuses on either individual postings or large-scale analyses of signal changes and is potentially overlooking o...

A growing number of community energy initiatives have enlarged energy-related social networks to the community level. Information provision is deemed as an important role in such programs while energy data disclosure offers a great opportunity to promote energy savings by engaging energy-related actors. However, it is crucial to communicate this da...

The transportation system in urban areas plays a critical role in evacuation and resource supply during disasters. Transportation diversity, i.e., the availability and distribution of transportation modes across a community, impacts the mode complementarity, which can affect population movements and connectivity among spatial units—especially durin...

Social networking platforms have been widely employed to detect and track physical events in population-dense urban areas. They can be effective tools to understand what happens and when and where it happens, either retrospectively or in real time. Correspondingly, a variety of approaches have been proposed for detecting either targeted or general...

Energy systems are evolving from large scale, centralized networks to decentralized, community-scale energy systems, within which citizens are expected to have much more central and proactive roles. Knowing that levels of citizen involvement can heavily influence the success and efficiency of community energy projects, research is exploring means t...

In developed nations, 20-40% of greenhouse gas emissions and more than one-third of energy consumption are attributable to buildings. Among various available strategies, the building sector has the greatest potential for carbon emission reduction. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) took early action to promote sustainable designs...

i3ce brief proposal or abstract.

Employees hold a range of attitudes and beliefs about their work life. This paper's contribution to the overall body of knowledge is to further the understanding of how construction professionals' work values are influenced by generational status. Improved understanding of the relationship between work values and generations can inform construction...

While technology advancements are improving the energy efficiency of buildings, occupant behavior remains a critical factor in ensuring the effectiveness of such enhancements. To this end, numerous eco-feedback systems have been developed to reduce building energy use through influencing occupants' behaviors during building operations. Information...

The need to equip cities with smart infrastructure systems that make them more sustainable, more prosperous, more resilient, and more equitable is a critical challenge of this generation. Rapid and often unplanned urbanization, the impacts of climate change, and aging infrastructure combine to increase the frequency and severity of impacts from nat...

Understanding population dynamics during natural disasters is important to build urban resilience in preparation for extreme events. Social media has emerged as an important source for disaster managers to identify dynamic polarity of sentiments over the course of disasters, to understand human mobility patterns, and to enhance decision making and...

As the scale and complexity of capital projects continue to increase, so do collaboration requirements among owners, engineers, architects, contractors, and other stakeholders in the project lifecycle. These organizational network challenges can impede successful project delivery. Innovation is a key factor in executing complex projects that requir...

The 25th Annual Workshop on Object Perception, Attention, and Memory (OPAM) was held on November 8–9, 2017 in Vancouver, BC, showcasing the best in graduate and postdoctoral research in the field of visual cognition. OPAM features talk and poster presentations by only trainee-level researchers. This special two-day meeting was funded in part by the...

Occupants are integral elements of a building ecosystem and their behavior can have a substantial impact on energy consumption in buildings. A wide range of energy feedback programs have been developed to make energy consumption more visible and interpretable to occupants and help them learn how to control and save energy. In this paper, we conduct...

Often in the construction industry, staffing for a capital project is structured upon selection of personnel to fulfill roles, leading to the formation of a temporary, project-based network that can be viewed as a single entity behaving like an organization. The primary goal of these organizations is the delivery of one project. This paper seeks to...

Values, or core beliefs that individuals experience as standards that guide how they should function, is emerging as a critical factor linked to workers’ decisions to remain in or depart from the construction industry. Many exploring satisfaction and work values build off of prior work in psychology and nursing, emphasizing the examination of misal...

The annual earthquake rate in Oklahoma (United States) has increased dramatically in recent years, owing in large part to the rapid proliferation of salt-water disposal (SWD) wells associated with unconventional oil and gas recovery. This study presents a geospatial analysis of earthquake occurrence and SWD volume within a 68,420 km² area in north-...

Increasing frequency of extreme winter storms has resulted in costly damages and a disruptive impact on the northeastern United States. It is important to understand human mobility patterns during such storms for disaster preparation and relief operations. We investigated the effects of severe winter storms on human mobility during a 2015 blizzard...

Fitting parameters of truncated power law and comparison results for daily radii of gyration. (DOC)

Daily data volume of tweets in the studied area from December 29, 2014 to February 8, 2015. (DOC)

Fitting parameters of lognormal distribution for daily displacements and comparison results with other distributions. (DOC)

Number of displacements in different ranges from January 5 to February 8, 2015. (DOC)

Binary logistic regression results for examining the impact of the winter storm on percentages of different displacements. (DOC)

Kolmogorov-Smirnov test between the distributions of MTW-based radii of gyration during distinct weeks. (DOC)

While technology advancements are increasingly improving the energy efficiency of buildings, occupant behavior remains a critical factor in ensuring the effectiveness of such enhancements. To this end, numerous eco-feedback systems have been developed to reduce building energy use through adjusting occupants’ behaviors. The information represented...

Within many construction and engineering organizations, communities of practice (CoPs) have become an important means for managing knowledge. They are employed to connect employees with technical specialists, which should reduce repeated mistakes, improve technical practice, and generate thought leadership. While organizations often implement CoPs...

Urban energy system strategies and decision making occur across many different spatial scales based on a complex combination of endogenous and exogenous effects. As an exogenous effect, urban human mobility has a statistically significant spatial relationship with energy use. However, the appropriate scale in decision making for an urban human mobi...

Inappropriate task allocation in construction activities results not only in lower productivity but also higher error rates and more work-related injuries. Without quantitative assessment of task demand, it is nearly impossible to achieve reasonable and flexible task allocation. However, it is extremely difficult to assess the mental/cognitive dema...

Grand Challenges are ambitious yet specific goals to galvanize a scholarly community for focused research and high impact. We solicited contributions from ten leading thinkers in the field of Engineering Project Organization (EPO) to elicit their visions for EPO research. Based on content analysis of the text in these statements, and analytical con...

Virtual design teams inherently bring new challenges to group decision making due to the technological barriers and lack of physical interaction. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to assess how spatially distributed engineering groups make complex decisions and whether a virtual work space amplifies or reduces barriers during the design of...

Urbanization is causing a significant increase in the amount, diversity, and complexity of human activities, all of which have a substantial impact on energy consumption. Current approaches to predicting energy demand at different spatiotemporal levels are functions of the characteristics of either individual buildings or cities and their occupancy...

Intra-city trips are undertaken by urban populations as individuals engage in activities across various locations, thus driving energy consumption. Spatial fluctuations in this energy use are, thus, often associated with the locational distribution of urban building types (i.e., residential and commercial). However, people exhibit heterogeneous pat...

Megaproject management (MPM) is a highly complex emerging research field with fragmental and diversified traits. Understanding the work on MPM and its classic texts can help advance the current body of knowledge significantly. However, to date, few quantitative methods exist that can determine the classic texts in MPM. This study aims to investigat...

There is general consensus that subsurface wastewater injections associated with unconventional oil and gas operations are responsible for the rapid increase of earthquake activity in the mid-U.S. Understanding the public response to these earthquakes is crucial for policy decisions that govern developing situational awareness and addressing percei...

Commercial buildings account for much of the energy use both in the United States and globally. The role of occupant behavior within the physical building has been found to be an important factor in the overall energy use profile of commercial buildings. Recent research has noted the potential energy savings that can be achieved when occupant behav...

Tower cranes are among the most frequently used heavy equipment in the construction industry for transporting materials in vertical and horizontal directions, which creates mechanical advantages for construction companies. Despite its advantages, enhancing the safety of tower crane operation is challenging. Crane activities require both a specializ...

Online social networks are today’s fastest growing communications channel and a popular source of information for many, so understanding their contribution to building awareness and shaping public perceptions of climate change is of utmost importance. Today’s online social networks are composed of complex combinations of entities and communication...