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Interviews/ Articles/ Conference Reviews/Research Papers

• Smart Campus IoT Success Strategies from Realcomm’s CoREtech 2017
• BAS Trends for 2018 – for Engineering Systems Magazine  Therese Sullivan was one of eight industry leaders/experts offering a brief take on trends they find interesting and noteworthy.
• Where are Global Energy Initiatives Taking Us?  The next quantum leap in building energy efficiency will come from optimizing at a systems level. The Systems Efficiency Initiative was formed in 2015 to move the whole industry. – Therese Sullivan interviews Clay Nesler, VP Global Energy and Sustainability, Johnson Controls about the Alliance to Save Energy’s Systems Efficiency Initiative.
• CABA Whitepaper: Intelligent Building Advances in Quick Service Restaurants Therese Sullivan was a member of the Working Group that contributed to this Frost&Sullivan-authored white paper designed to serve as an authoritative guide to assist industry stakeholders in making decisions about QSR products, services and technologies.
• The Wouda, Couda, and OODA of Building Performance Data Engineering As part of the Project Haystack open-source community, I’m learning that small can equal big, and less can be more, and that ‘big data’ engineers and ‘building performance data engineers’ have important but different roles in the coming era of the IoT and machine learning.
• Your Buildings’ 21st Century Edge   What are the takeaway lessons here regarding how edge analytics controllers will disrupt the current building industry? – Alper Üzmezler, BASSG LLC. & Therese Sullivan, Principal, BuildingContext Ltd

• Will DevOps Culture Come to Smart Buildings?  How can commercial building project teams get in sync with enterprise software innovators and embrace the concept and culture of DevOps.

• Highlights from Realcomm-IBcon San Diego  The Fear-of-Missing-Out was intense.

• Haystack Connect and IoT World Set Foot on Common Ground  From Saddlebrook to Silicon Valley, everyone is talking about using data to bring order, efficiency and transparency to the operational challenges of running buildings.
• Operational Analytics, Cyber Security Tools & the Deming Way  Today’s operational analytics, cyber security tools, and other business intelligence software are all ‘grandchildren’ of the statistical process control charts made popular by Deming.
• Will DevOps Culture Come to Smart Buildings? You could say that they’ve embraced the DevOps philosophy of ‘turning the power struggle with IT into the power of collaboration.
• BASSG Open Sources Project Builder Plus  Paves Fast Track to Haystack Tagging
• Alper Uzmezler Explains Expansion into Edge Devices and ML  Anka Labs’ goal is to breathe new life into buildings through the deployment of edge analytics controllers and related innovations. – Alper Uzmezler and Therese Sullivan
• How 2016 CTA-Goers Made It Their Night The CTAs have become an important night for many, and serve a variety of community-building functions.
• The Label Maker…is You  Appreciating How Metadata Makes AI Possible
• Darwin and the Dynamism of an Open Source Community at Work  Darwin is a good reminder of what it takes to survive times of upheaval, uncertainty, and challenge.
• Playing Metadata Tag “U R it.  Brick Schema builds on the concept of tags from Project Haystack and enriches the schema with an underlying ontology that crystallizes the concepts defined by the tags…
• The Story Threads to Follow as Smart Buildings Enter a New Year  The storyline that emerged in 2016 offered new clues and revealed certain dead-ends.
• Today’s Smart Building Data Exhaust May Be Tomorrow’s Machine-Learning Gold  Smart Building Owners should remain vigilant in the battle against vendor lock-in of their building data.
• Climate Action, Digitalization and the Opportunity to Reenergize the Buildings Industry  Climate laws and agreements are being enacted, and big building technology companies like Siemens are positioning to come out heroes with even healthier businesses.
• San Diego Padres Deploy IoT Edge Gateways to Monitor and Save Water and Energy in Ballpark  Qualcomm Edge Intelligent solutions and OSIsoft PI System help monitor Petco Park facilities in real-time to improve efficiencies and maximize the value of their current infrastructure.
• When Will Machine Learning Reach Smart Buildings?  There is a Mount Olympus-like battle over Machine Learning dominance happening among Tech Titans. Smart Buildings and the IoT exist in the weather created by that battle. – Alper Üzmezler,
  BASSG LLC. & Therese Sullivan, BuildingContext Ltd
• Data Flow Will Mirror Air Flow in the Era of Hybrid Edge Controllers  One affordable, flexible device that can serve as either a global controller or a field DDC will go a long way to better HVAC system designs. – Alper Üzmezler, BASSG LLC. & Therese Sullivan BuildingContext Ltd
• Realcomm/IBcon Silicon Valley Recap  Measuring momentum in Intelligent Buildings awareness
• Applying All the Laws of 3 to See the Future of Smart Buildings Edge Control Will Shift BAS-Industry Focus Toward People and Productivity
• A Legoland for the IoT Maker  They have low-cost compute devices like Arduino and Raspberry Pi as well as affordable sensors (accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, GPS, temperature, etc).
• Open Source is the New Marketing– Part 2  Participation in open source communities can be a vector into the buying process. You need people on your marketing team capable of engaging with developers.
• Open Source is the New Marketing  Developers that participate in open-source communities benefit from the opportunity to ‘try before you buy.’
• How Will the IoT Create More Intelligent Buildings?  With an IoT-enabled intelligent building, you can build any service to bring old processes into the 21st century. Your imagination is really the only limitation. – Dragan Boscovic, CEO, VizLore
• Death of the Controls Industry  Be brave and ask for something truly open that provides you with access and choice.
• Project-Haystack Connections E-zine Launches  New digital publication keeps communications for and about Project-Haystack adopters flowing and serves as a starter kit for any organization that wants to get on board.
• Crisis of Conscience  SF Tech Contemplates its Relationship to Real World Industries
• The Way Forward from Paris is Via Automated M&V  Investment dollars to transform commercial building energy wasters into high performers are there, but won’t be tapped until bankers are confident in the measurement and verification of savings.
• Six New Routes to Market for Smart Building Technology  You may feel that you keep hitting a brick wall trying to convince some customers to adopt data analytics strategies for better building performance. But, ‘take heart,’ the route to Smart Building success may be just around the next turn. – Anno Scholten, President, Connexx Energy & Therese Sullivan, Principal, BuildingContext Ltd
• CoRE Tech’s Silicon Valley Message: ‘Just Do It.’
• Of Pitchforks and Haystacks  So now I’ve been an observer of this market long enough to see hype become reality — albeit with some changes to the who, when and how.
• Data Centers Reach Toward Operational Excellence Guided by Predictive Analytics  Operational Data from Real-time Monitoring Makes the Difference between a Simulated Approximation and Reliable Decision Support
• Navigating the New Landscape of Energy Efficiency, Renewables and Microgrids
• Semantic Spaces: Where Everything is in a Name  Last month, Toby Considine closed his column with an invitation to meet him in Northern California in mid-September, where he was speaking at the TechIntersection conference.  I seized that opportunity to interview Toby on the topic of “the semantic web.”
• Buildings Internet of Things Architecture “Hats Off” to the Realcomm team and to the Intelligent Buildings industry that they represent. They nailed the architecture for the Buildings Internet of Things (B-IoT) about 24 months before the big IT brands at the core of the IIC — Cisco, Intel, IBM, GE — offered theirs.
• Solar Panel Analysis  Demonstrating the power of building operational analytics to keep unattended distributed power systems functioning as intended.
• Has Project Haystack Moved the Building IoT Across the Chasm?  Has support for standardization efforts like BACnet and Project Haystack naming/tagging taxonomy grown to the point that it is providing a pathway for data-driven building operations technologies across the Chasm?
• Vibrant Ecosystem Ups the Value of a Building’s IoT Platform  How applications and services from partners like BASSG add to the strength of the SkySpark™ platform, supporting data analytics project teams through the whole cycle from data aggregation to action.
• Davis California Revs Ahead in Utility-Side Data Analytics UC Davis Utilities is now engaged in an energy load disaggregation project that combines research, operations and public-facing mobile and web applications.
• Realcomm 2015: Feel Secure in Your Discomfort and Excitement. It Means You’re Listening.
• The Mockingjay in Nest  Exploring the dystopian side of Venture Capitalitist-led Silicon Valley, where the culture has us rooting for young start-ups, until we start jeering.
• Last Month in the Automation Ballet  In just the last few weeks there were some notable announcements about automation and machine learning coming from all corners.
• Round Up the Right Data, Not the Usual Suspects
• Enterprise Computing Landscape  Will Building Operations and Facilities Provide Video Chat Apps a First Foothold?
• Considering Collaboration Platforms for Your Whole-Building Hub  “Lots of people are trying to ‘solve’ email… Maybe the solution will be that everyone who uses email will die off.”  Ben Evans, Analyst, Andreessen Horowitz
• The Cutting-Edge of IoT  How does the IoT really change the future of commercial building operations?
• Where do Whole-Building Analytics Fit in the Energy Professional’s Toolkit?  The need for building energy analysis is growing, the talent pool of building energy experts is limited. New whole-building energy performance assessment tools are one way technology innovators are trying to fill the gap.
• Taps Open for Energy Efficiency Retrofits And it’s up to System Integrators, Equipment Operators and Facilities Managers to make the new financing models based on energy savings work.
• BuildingContext  I called my marketing agency BuildingContext because it captured in two words what I wanted to do — bring some context to the crowded and noisy smart building marketplace.
• How do you Spell IoT for Smart Buildings?  The backdrop today is the huge IT-sponsored IoT marketing and awareness campaign, which would have you believe that Smart Building Analytics are an IT invention.
• DGLux5 Training Hop Aboard the Future Express
• Sound Bites, Surprises and Solid Advice from the Smart Building Integrator Summit (SBIS) at IBcon 2014  Their common message was that open-architected, interoperable building automation systems (BAS) are at the nucleus of the next phase of human-to-machine connectivity.
• IIoT Middleware Choices  DDS middleware poised to gain traction for the Industrial Internet of Things
• 15 Years in the Collaboratory Why It Was Time for a Timeline
• IoT Opens to Mobile Messaging Standards the Direction is toward Open Standards
• A New Data Superhighway Out of Thin Air  Wi-Fi at Gigabyte speeds Changes the Game in Wireless Infrastructure as Networking Enters an Accelerated Innovation Phase.
• Mobile Network Operators (MNO) & Building Automation  Are Mobile Operators Eyeing Building Automation as their next M2M Vertical – You Can Bet on It!
• A Question of Gravity  Who Owns the Future of Smart Buildings and Cities?
• What is a Security Fabric?  And Who is Afraid of Not Having One?
• Disruptive Innovation makes Cloud Era Possible  The world lacks a building automation and control ontology