Showing posts with label Cummings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cummings. Show all posts

Sunday, March 6, 2016

B7 (or B6?), Group B - Cummings



This class was very much one where you get out what you put in.  It provided us with ample tools to investigate all the topics that were presented in class, but it was up to us to take advantage of them to really learn some things from the course and do above average, instead of just drifting through to the end of the term—which is how I think a graduate-level course should be.  

Speaking from my personal perspective, I always expected this course, “intelligent buildings,” to be quite literally about smart, automated, buildings with sensors and such.  This was definitely touched upon in several ways, with the discussion on sensors, and mention of the internet of things.  I was impressed with the scope beyond this that the course was able to reach, and in my opinion it did so in a very creative way.  I overall gained insight into more things and developed a different perspective than I would have if this were just another technical class on building automation systems, so I am grateful that my initial interpretation of the course description showed to be in some ways wrong.   Some of these include the potential applications of 3D printing and robotics in the building industry.  I value learning these more abstract concepts—not as much in the sense that it may give me a competitive edge in industry—but more so because these concepts have the potential to break the rut of business as usual design-bid-build engineering.  So much of our education as engineers is about a training us to do a job, which is absolutely necessary.  But at least for me, this class was about more.  I believe these types of classes should be considered equally as important as the aforementioned, although I get the sense that they are not considered to be so.  This class was about the improvement of the industry: in what directions it may be improved, the technological, environmental, and also social implications of these improvements, and also the limitations of how far an emerging technology can go.

The class wasn’t only about the abstract.  I thought the BIM, database, and sensor topics had their own benefits too.  I think learning the background operations of how these technologies work instead of simply learning how to operate them is what distinguishes the engineers from other professions.  We should have the critical thinking necessary to know the limitations of the technology we use.  We should know how to proceed when technologies don’t work exactly how they should.  For my term project, I investigated the internal operations of an aerosol sensor.  I realized how crazy of a level of detail the study of these things can go, and how complex of a process is it is to convert individual aerosol particles into meaningful and accurate data.  And I definitely know to what extent to trust certain types of particle sensors after this project.  From the BIM portion of the class, it was obvious that people can (and probably have) gotten PhD’s in the field.  So AE510 certainly did not comprehensively teach us how to understand all of these systems—although it did give us a reasonable amount of background knowledge on technologies relevant to us.  But it did teach us how we should treat the technologies we use, rather than blindly using them.  This was reinforced when—I believe it was the guest lecturer week 6 or 7, but I’m forgetting his name—gave us practical first-hand experience about how the inaccuracies of humidity sensors can affect his practice.  But of course the critical thinking this teaches us, in the context of BIM or databases or sensors, is only useful if we know how to operate the respective technologies, but that can be done over CoOp, in other classes, or on our own time.  

In terms of the academics of this course, I enjoyed the blog post assignments and thought they were an efficient way of making what was lectured in class stick, as well as put importance on paying attention and attending the lecture periods.  One change I would definitely make is trying to turn the single blog post and one-way comment into more of a conversation.  I read a lot of blog posts with very engaging comments that would have led to a very thought provoking conversation, but those good comments were never replied to because after the students (myself included) finished their two comments, they’d cross it off their to-do list and not return to it until next week.  With respect to the term project, its constraints being so flexible was another example of how we only got what we put in.  This was definitely a good thing.  It enabled us to delve into a topic that resonates with us, allowing us to want to put in a lot of work on it to learn more about our chosen topic.  This is compared to most traditional projects where we mindlessly complete a set number of tasks to fulfill requirements without really learning anything valuable, like most undergraduate term projects.



Comments:
Alexis Aikins
Allison Lock

Saturday, February 6, 2016

B5, Group B - Cummings



SQL stands for Structured Query Language, and it is the standard language used specified by ANSI to communicate with a database, specifically a relational database.  A relational database, as a digital relational model, organizes data into tables which represent relations between the column and row vectors.  SQL is used to perform tasks on the database, which can include database updates, modification, and data retrieval [1].  These transactions are made through SQL via language elements which include clauses (such as “update” or “set”, etc.), expressions (which are the arguments and can either be a vector or scalar), predicates (which specify evaluated conditions through logical statements, e.g. true/false/equal/etc,), queries (which retrieves the data based on the previously established criteria—often makes use of the “select” statement). [2]


The following depicts a simple SQL query, taken from Wikipedia.  Here, the “Select” query is to retrieve points from the “Book” vector (expression) whose corresponding prices (from a “price” vector) are greater than 100.
SQL of this type is standard for overall database communication.  However, most systems also have their own proprietary languages added on which they can use on their own internal system. 


A significance of SQL is that is the operator behind nearly every movement on a website [3].  Websites are not much more than a series of databases, and interaction between different parts of the site require at the least communication and exchange to the databases (for actions such as switching from one page to another) and sometimes modification of the database (which can happen during online purchase) [4].  All of these interactions are based on queries in SQL.  It is such a universal language that many other tools have been built off it used for other application.  In relation to the scope of this course, the importance of SQL is that most—if not probably all—BIM software is built upon relational database, as described above.  Therefore, SQL is crucial part and limiting factor of BIM’s functionality.

[2]       ANSI/ISO/IEC International Standard (IS). Database Language SQL—Part 2: Foundation (SQL/Foundation). 1999.

Saturday, January 30, 2016

B4, Group B - Cummings



I am an architectural engineer because I have always been interested in sustainability and have always loved the built environment.  Yet few parts of the undergraduate AE curriculum has particularly caught my passion, including structural, architectural, and even HVAC design.  I’ve discovered that my real passion lies in the governing mathematical and analytical principles of more fundamental physical systems.  For this term project I wanted to focus on those underlying principles of a sustainability issue in the built environment.  One branch of sustainability that relates to fundamental physical systems is the issue air quality, either indoor or outdoor. 
            An area of the study of air quality that incorporates both sustainability and intelligent buildings is the measurement of pollutants.  Aerosols, or particulate matter, can be detrimental for some manufacturing processes, dangerous in operating rooms, and are an irritant and can be harmful to human health in general.  PM sensors provide valuable information for the operation of certain buildings, whether it’s a lab, clean room, hospital, or just a building where occupant health or comfort is a high consideration.  James and I believe that it is not enough to simply operate or take information blindly from the sensors.  Sensors provide data that is only a representation of the physical reality.  Accuracy, precision, limitations, and factors that may affect all of the above must be considered for on operator to make trustworthy decisions based on sensor information.  This has been a theme of the intelligent buildings course: to understand not just how to use building technology, but to understand the how and the why behind it.  This is especially important if the sensors are to be tied into a building’s automation system, to be able to transfer the physical molecular interactions into digital signals into outputted data which can communicate with an automation system. 
            This term project involves two major parts: a research component and a modeling component.  James and I will research what different types of particulate sensors are used and how they work.  In particular, we will be focusing on the physical phenomena on the molecular level that leads to the input of data.  This is perhaps the most crucial part to understand as it will reveal the functionality, capabilities, and limits of the equipment.  Another major part of the research component will be to determine how the output data is structured and read by other programs or the user.  The second component of this project will be to model a PM sensor in a computer program, likely matlab.  We can use sample known particle distributions and create a function that reads that data as a sensor would read physical particles.  By varying the parameters of the model sensor we can correlate and quantify how certain parameters and sensor properties affect the sensor’s precision and reliability.   
            There are of course several challenges we will face in the creation of this model.  Firstly, the mathematics behind the transport of aerosols is not elementary.  We also have limited experience with data processing in matlab—with our only formal experience being in engr202 which was arguably less than beneficial.  However, the information we will have learned by the end of the term will have come from overcoming these challenges, and I’m excited to grasp new concepts and develop new skills throughout the course of this project.

Comments:
Sean Coffey
Allison Lock