Leonel Aguilar

ETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · Department of Computer Science

IUMENTA (Latin for livestock) is an innovative software framework designed to construct and simulate digital twins of animals. By leveraging the powerful capability of the Open Digital Twin Platform (ODTP) alongside advanced software sensors, IUMENTA offers researchers a user-friendly tool to seamlessly develop adaptive digital replicas of animal-b...

Experiments as Code (ExaC) is a concept for reproducible, auditable, debuggable, reusable, & scalable experiments. Experiments are a crucial tool to understand Human-Building Interactions (HBI) and build a coherent theory around it. However, a common concern for experiments is their auditability and reproducibility. Experiments are usually designed...

The study aims to deepen our understanding of how systematic design variations applied to the spatial configurations of three distinct workplace typologies — Open plan, Cellular, and Bürolandschaft — impact individuals' attitudes towards workplace environments. Specifically, it explores how variations in key architectural features such as partition...

In this paper, we explore the mutual effect of prior background expectations and visibility afforded by the 3D configuration of the physical environment on wayfinding efficiency and strategy in multilevel buildings. We perform new analyses on data from 149 participants who performed six unaided and directed wayfinding tasks in virtual buildings wit...

BACKGROUND Children living in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) are at greater risk for experiencing adversities that can undermine their health and early development. Recently launched online early childhood development (ECD) programmes attempt to support children in their home environments using digital technologies. However, these programme...

Background Children living in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) are at greater risk for experiencing adversities that can undermine their health and early development. Recently launched digital early childhood development (ECD) programs attempt to support families with young children in their home environments using digital technologies. Howe...

This paper reports on an online study to investigate the interaction between the environment typology, and crowdedness with aesthetic perceptions of the environment.

Introduction Digital parenting interventions could be potentially cost-effective means for providing early child development services in low-income settings. This 5-month mixed-methods pilot study evaluated the feasibility of using Afinidata , a comprehensive Facebook Messenger -based digital parenting intervention in a remote rural setting in Lati...

A set of three key architectural parameters, including partition height, contour, and ceiling height, were systematically varied across three common workspace typologies, resulting in 36 virtual workspace models. The location from which images were captured was sampled from the location with the highest visibility for either sitting or standing loc...

Smart Cities already surround us, and yet they are still incomprehensibly far from directly impacting everyday life. While current Smart Cities are often inaccessible, the experience of everyday citizens may be enhanced with a combination of the emerging technologies Digital Twins (DTs) and Situated Analytics. DTs represent their Physical Twin (PT)...

Understanding the human factors governing effective information exchange is increasingly indispensable for the design of day to day human-computer systems. Moreover, effective information exchange becomes a matter of life or death during emergency egress. The complexity of an unknown environment and the unpredictable locations of hazards often prev...

Smart Cities already surround us, and yet they are still incomprehensibly far from directly impacting everyday life. While current Smart Cities are often inaccessible, the experience of everyday citizens may be enhanced with a combination of the emerging technologies Digital Twins (DTs) and Situated Analytics. DTs represent their Physical Twin (PT)...

Sensors have become ubiquitous in buildings but are rarely connected to a network, and their potential to analyse the performance, use, and interaction with a building is not yet fully realised. In the coming years, we expect sensors in buildings to become part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and grow in numbers to form a Dense Indoor Sensor Networ...

Current approaches to simulate occupants' wayfinding in AEC mostly employ direct routing algorithms that assume global knowledge of the navigation environment to compute a shortest path between two locations. This simplification overlooks evidence concerning the role of perception and cognition during wayfinding in complex buildings, leading to pot...

A common concern in experimental research is the auditability and reproducibility of experiments. Experiments are usually designed, provisioned, managed, and analyzed by diverse teams of specialists (e.g., researchers, technicians and engineers) and may require many resources (e.g. cloud infrastructure, specialized equipment). Even though researche...

In the event of fires and other hazards, visual guidance systems that support evacuation are critical for the safety of individuals. Current visual guidances for evacuations are typically non-adaptive signs in that they always indicate the same exit route independently of the hazard’s location. Adaptive signage systems can facilitate wayfinding dur...

Visibility is the degree to which different parts of the environment can be observed from a given vantage point. In the absence of previous familiarity or signage, the visibility of key elements in a multilevel environment (e.g., the entrance, exit, or the destination itself) becomes a primary input to make wayfinding decisions and avoid getting lo...

Recent advances in Augmented Reality (AR), the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and Digital Twins transform the types, rates, and volume of information generated in buildings as well as the mediums through which they can be perceived by users. These advances push the standard approach of media architecture to embed screens in the built en...

Findings from cognitive science link the architectural complexity of multilevel buildings with occupants' difficulty in orienting and finding their way. Nevertheless, current approaches to modelling occupants' wayfinding reduce the representation of 3D multilevel buildings to isolated 2D graphs of each floor. These graphs do not take account of the...

The interaction between phenotypic plasticity, e.g. learning, and evolution is an important topic both in Evolutionary Biology and Machine Learning. The evolution of learning is commonly studied in Evolutionary Biology, while the use of an evolutionary process to improve learning is of interest to the field of Machine Learning. This paper takes a d...

This paper presents a mass evacuation simulator capable to handle complex cognitive agents in large urban areas considering sub-meter details of the environment. Details of the evacuation simulation software in the context of dynamical systems provide a common ground for the comparison with other evacuation simulation tools and a software specifica...

In human behavioral analysis, it is desired to accurately define basic quantities related to the decision-making process. In game theoretic models, essential such quantities are the utilities representing and quantifying behavioral preferences. Commonly, in order to estimate these quantities mobility patterns need to be extracted and the individual...

This short paper presents an HPC enhanced Agent Based Model (ABM) developed with the aim of quantitatively estimating the strategies for accelerating emergency mass evacuations, like tsunami evacuation. In order to facilitate inclusion of various influencing factors, such as localized congestion, multi-modes, pedestrian vehicle interactions, fallen...

This paper presents some of the techniques, algorithms and designs used to enable mass evacuation simulations to take advantage of high performance computing infrastructure. A brief overview of a tsunami mass evacuation simulator capable of simulating urban areas of hundreds of km² in sub-meter detail is provided. Enhancements to the serial algorit...

The effect of phenotypic plasticity on evolution, the so-called Baldwin effect, has been studied extensively for more than 100 years. Plasticity is known to influence the speed of evolution towards a specific genetic configuration, but whether it also influences what that genetic configuration is, is still an open question. This question is investi...

An automatic evacuation management system taking advantage of a multi agent based mass evacuation simulator is proposed and prototyped. The aim of this system is to provide a stepping stone in the direction of automated evacuation managing. The proposed system is currently capable of identifying evacuation anomalies, proposing a mitigation strategy...

This work presents the enhancements of a scalable multi-agent based large urban area evacuation simulator, with the aim of quantitatively evaluating mixed mode evacuations with cars and pedestrians. This dissertation introduces a mathematical framework to provide a language and notation necessary to explain the multi-agent system and the enhancemen...

This paper presents a multi-agent based evacuation simulation software capable of simulating mass mixed mode evacuations of large areas including sub meter details of the environment. A mathematical framework is introduced in order to provide a framework for the specification and description of the software, enabling to compare the developed multi-...

A multi-agent based large urban area evacuation simulator is developed with the aim of addressing the limitations of the present large area simulators. Environment model of sub-meter details and agents which can visually perceive it are implemented, so that complex evacuees behaviours can be included, making it possible to study scenarios beyond th...

An agent based model, which includes detailed model of the environment and agents with functionalities to interact with it, is developed for simulating large area evacuations. This model makes it possible to quantitatively estimate the effects of various important factors, like interaction with environment and neighbor agents in low lighting condit...

An evacuation simulation code based on Multi Agent Systems (MAS), with moderately complex agents in 2D grid environments, is developed. The main objective of this code is to estimate the effectiveness of the measures taken to smoothen and speedup the evacuation process of a large urban area, in time critical events like tsunami. A vision based auto...

This paper presents implementation, verification and validation of autonomous navigation and collision avoidance algorithms in a multi agent based evacuation simulation code. The code is being developed with the aim of evaluating the effectiveness of different means to make time critical evacuation process, in large complex urban areas, fast and sm...

With the aim of estimating the effectiveness of the measures taken to smoothen and speedup the evacuation process of a large urban area, in time critical events like tsunami, a multi agent based mass evacuation simulation software is being developed. Considering the fact that it involves large number of human casualties, moderately complex agents i...