This Fulbright Scholar trains the next generation of smart building operators
Fulbright Scholar and Northeastern professor Michael Kane will travel to Buenos Aires to translate his building operations program into Spanish and teach students.
For the past few years, Northeastern University professor Michael Kane and his team have been taking students at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School in Boston on virtual reality building walkthroughs to help them enter the mind of a building operations manager.
As students learn the ins and outs of pipes, heating and air conditioning systems, and the building’s electrical underpinnings, they are asked to consider several questions business operations managers think about on the regular: What in this building affects its power and energy use? What in this building impacts people? And lastly, how, as building operators, do we navigate those questions and solve workers’ challenges.
These exercises are part of a 14-hour building operators training certification pilot that Kane, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and a few collaborators have developed with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The program has a few primary goals: to introduce entry-level workers to modern automation and smart technologies that are being integrated into buildings — think smart battery energy systems and smart lights — and to train them to take a human-first approach when solving challenges, he explained.
Northeastern Global News, in your inbox.
Sign up for NGN’s daily newsletter for news, discovery and analysis from around the world.
The program does this by taking students through virtual walkthroughs and by having students complete business operations tasks using simulation software. Tasks include everything from checking thermostats to responding to building occupant complaints.
This project intersects with Kane’s broader work in automated systems, such as smart thermostats and how to incorporate human behavior into their implementation and design.
In September, Kane will take that training program with him to the Instituto Tecnólogico de Buenos Aires, or ITBA, in Argentina and translate the program into Spanish as a Fulbright Scholar, a highly prestigious and competitive fellowship awarded by the U.S. government to academics doing important international work.
Kane will also take a copy of the translated program back with him once he returns to Boston with the intention of developing a version of it for underserved English language speakers in the United States.
He noted that “28% of the Madison Park students are English language learners and 53% of its students identify as Hispanic/Latino.”
In Argentina, Kane will also work with the institute to host a major International Energy Agency conference focused on human-centric building management and energy consumption.
During his three months in Argentina, Kane will work closely with Romina Rissetto, an engineering professor and researcher at ITBA.
She said what sets Kane’s curriculum apart is its focus on teaching students the deep intersections between modern building design and occupant behavior.
“We don’t have many operational systems developed for our educational systems in our buildings,” she said. “So I think we’re going to learn a lot from this experience and how we will implement this protocol.”
The program will also be taught to the university’s building operators as it continues to build out its campus.
The university, in fact, is in the process of building a new academic building, and Kane’s protocol will no doubt be helpful once it is up and running, Rissetto said.
The hope is to also integrate the program into the university’s broader engineering curriculum and teach it to students, she said, adding that the university’s civil engineering program is only three years old.
“We have organized lectures where he is going to introduce students on this new topic, and we’re also aiming to see if we can find other research ideas and activities that we can develop in the future,” she said.
