CEE Department Seminar: Burcin Becerik-Gerber

The CEE department seminar series presents lectures from a diverse range of professors, industry leaders, and alumni, and covers topics discussed throughout CEE’s four core research areas. All members of the CMU community are welcome to attend CEE department seminars. From Sensing to Adaptation: Human-Centered Intelligence in the Built Environment The built environment is increasingly able to sense, learn, and respond, creating new opportunities to rethink how we design, construct, operate, and experience buildings and infrastructure. This talk presents our research toward human-centered intelligent built environments, from multimodal sensing and modeling of human experiences and interactions with buildings to AI-enabled simulation of human behavior and emergency response, adaptive building systems, and human–robot interaction and teleoperation in construction. Across these applications, a common question drives our work: how can we move beyond systems that simply collect data or automate predefined tasks toward environments and machines that understand context, anticipate human needs, and adapt their behavior accordingly? I will discuss recent advances and remaining challenges in creating built environments in which people, machines, and physical spaces can increasingly sense, learn from, and adapt to one another. Bio: Dr. Burcin Becerik-Gerber is a Professor and Chair of the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California and the Founder and Director of the USC Center for Intelligent Environments (CENTIENTS). Her research focuses on advanced sensing, data science, and artificial intelligence to support the design, construction, and operation of human-centered, adaptive buildings and infrastructure systems. She pioneered the field of Human-Building Interaction (HBI), which examines how human experience and behavior interact with intelligent, engineered systems in the built environment. Dr. Becerik-Gerber has a