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Philosophy
“Disruptive technologies such as AI,IoT,Big-data, CPS etc. has the potential to make systems smarter by automating processes and optimizing resource usage, and thus enabling humankind to solve some of the grand challenges of 21st century e.g. climate change, sustainability. However, this is only possible if we make a concerted effort to make such smarter systems think rationally, for instance, are decisions made by AI good for everyone or is it good for some individuals or interest groups? Formalizing and embedding this notion into building+urban design is still a distant future. Unless this is done, pervasive use of such technologies in facilities management & enterprise operation shall possibly lead to irreversible harm”
vision
Responsible Design of Buildings and Cities for Low-Carbon Digital Age
"…the art & science of solving the trilemma between understanding the benefits (e.g. improved energy efficiency, reduced carbon emissions) offered by a certain design approach (e.g. integrated, high-performance, net-zero, green), together with the understanding of landscape of threats (e.g. cyber-physical hazards) and their consequences (e.g. loss of lives, trust, autonomy, property damage), and thus provide the scientific knowledge and tools (e.g. taxonomy, guidelines, certification) necessary to be able to judiciously balance them during the design process”
The Interconnection, Interaction and Integration (the 3I's) are turning out to be indispensable aspects of design thinking that position contemporary complex systems as CPS that offer Autonomy, Agency, and Assurance (the 3A's) in the digital future. A part of my research interest is investigating "how to employ systems-thinking to be able to develop new methods that can instigate responsible design of complex urban systems?" In my opinion, this is an important link between my ongoing study and Cybernetics. In this context,
"People4Tech" - I envisage responsible design thinking as a blend of art and science of asking the right questions developing deeper scientific insights into root-causes and its consequences engraining the right mindset in engineers, designers, and policy-makers.
"Tech4People" - I envision the responsible design of buildings as an emerging, multi-faceted research problem, which is rooted in truly interdisciplinary fields of systems science, anthropology, building science, the science of risk and resilience, and institutional ethics.
The following are some of recent outcomes reflecting my thoughts and contributions in this field of science.
Seminal Research published as Vision Article
The Concept of Smartness in Cyber-Physical Systems and Connection to Urban Environment
My latest seminal research study related to Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is publication as a Vision Article.
This article lays the theoretical foundation of “what Cyber-Physical-System is about?” In addition, demystify the ambiguity surrounding “how does CPSs offer smartness?” in an epistemological manner by combining technological, systemic and anthropocentric perspectives.
Thus, article develops and proposes a generic conceptual framework, which can find application in explicating the smartness of any complex urban socio-technical system, which falls under the class of CPS by their design and implementation (e.g. autonomous vehicle, telemedicine, smart city, smart factories, and smart buildings) in a systematic manner. Furthermore, we showed how to apply the theoretical framework to assess smartness of a real office building as a case study. This study is a step towards engraining the scientific foundation to responsible design thinking in complex technological systems.
A Taxonomy for Cross-domain Fire Hazards in Building Design
On the applied research front, this latest research article demonstrates how to develop responsible design thinking methods through a taxonomy, by asking the right questions, understanding the functional capabilities of smart systems, leading to developing potentially hazardous scenarios leading to cross-domain fire hazards in smart homes. This was recently presented at the 30th European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL2020PSAM15) in Venice in Nov'20, and published in the conference proceedings.
Towards Modeling Cyber-Physical Hazards in Buildings: Interdisciplinary Approach
In my other latest research article, I developed a new theoretical method that allows identifying the 3I's, furthermore model and represent them in an amenable form to analyze the 3A's in a real-world CPS using buildings as an example. However, in principle, the proposed method can be applied to any urban system which is cyber-physical and complex socio-technical by design. This article is accepted for presentation in forthcoming Interdisciplinary conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICSP2020) and expected to be published in the proceedings of IEEE Computer Society.
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