Zhengbo Zou

New York University | NYU · Department of Civil and Urban Engineering

Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) is a testing paradigm where physical sensors (e.g., monitoring sensors such as cameras and proximity sensors, and alarm sensors such as screaming traffic cones) are connected to a virtual test system that simulates reality (e.g., virtual work zone with simulated dangerous situations). This paradigm is well-suited for cond...

Built environments play an essential role in our day-to-day lives since people spend more than 85% of their times indoors. Previous studies at the conjunction of neuroscience and architecture confirmed the impact of architectural design features on varying human experience, which propelled researchers to study the improvement of human experience in...

Today, more than half of the world's population lives in cities, and this trend appears to be growing. Despite a need to understand how design elements of urban living impact our psychological well-being (e.g., stress), very little research has used quantitative, objective tools to measure how existing or proposed urban development impacts the huma...

Built environments are influential in shaping human experiences, such as motivation to work, stress/anxiety, and pleasure. Subtle differences in architectural design feature configurations (e.g., texture of surfaces, symmetry of building components) influence the resulting human experiences. This paper is part of a larger study that aims to quantif...

Optimal control of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems (HVACs) aims to minimize the energy consumption of equipment while maintaining the thermal comfort of occupants. Traditional rule-based control methods are not optimized for HVAC systems with continuous sensor readings and actuator controls. Recent developments in deep reinforceme...

Continuous construction and rehabilitation in urban settings have unavoidable impacts on arrival times of first responders to emergency locations. Current research efforts on emergency response assessments focus on case studies, where specific periods (e.g., super storm Sandy) of emergency response times are analyzed. Simulation based studies that...

Design of office spaces plays an essential role in people’s day-to-day work productivity. Research in environmental psychology and neuroscience indicates distinct architectural design features (e.g., color coding, texture, and space layouts, etc.) impact human performance and motivation to work in office spaces. In the current practice, occupants e...

The impact of built environment on the human restorativeness has long been argued; however, the interrelations between neuroscience and the built environment, and the degree to which the built environment contributes to increased human restorativeness has not been completely understood yet. Understanding the interrelations between neuroscience and...

According to the World Bank, more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, creating burdens on the degraded city infrastructures and driving up the demand for new ones. Construction sites are abundant in already dense cities and have unavoidable impacts on surrounding environments and residents. However, such impacts were rarely qua...

Protecting the passengers' safety and increasing ridership are two never ending pursuits of public transit agencies. One of the proposed methods to achieve both goals for subway service is to implement real time train arriving countdown clocks in subway stations. Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) of New York City (NYC) chose to install su...

People spend more than 90% of their time indoors, making it essential to understand how the built environment can influence human experience and assess how the changes in architectural design features can impact this experience. Human experience in an architectural space is defined as the state of mind that is reflected on our physiological, emotio...

Inefficient communication among project stakeholders is one of the most critical issues in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. In reality, it is difficult to create a common understanding about a project among key stakeholders located remotely. The recent progress of virtual reality (VR) makes it a promising approach for...

Building information models (BIMs) have been used by the Architectural/Engineering/Construction (AEC) industry with a focus on storing and exchanging digital information about building components. However, the untapped potential of BIMs in facility operations and the experience of facility operators while they interact with digital building informa...

Virtual Reality (VR) has attracted increasing attention of the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management (AEC/FM) industry in recent years, as it shows a great potential to improve workflow efficiency through enhanced common understanding. A problem with current VR applications in AEC/FM is that the manual conversation from of...

Building information modeling (BIM) users in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) have previously used virtual reality (VR) environments to support coordination and information visualization. With recent advancements in inexpensive and ubiquitous computing power, BIM users have access to multiple types of VR systems ranging from non-imm...