Team Led by Prof. Zhe Wang Receives Awards at Global AI Challenge Competition

A team composed of Prof. Zhe WANG, Assistant Professor, Mr. Yuze WU, Research Assistant of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ms. Mingyue GUO, incoming PhD student of CIVL and graduate of Tongji University, and Ms. Sha Huajing from the Terminus Group, has received the Huawei Most Innovative Use of Data Award (grand prize of the academic group, awarded only to the top five out of 41 teams), a gold award in the academic group, and the Best Use of Tencent Cloud Award (special prize) at the Global AI Challenge for Building E&M Facilities. The award ceremony will be held during the third quarter of 2022.

Jointly held by the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation and the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department of the HKSAR, the Global AI Challenge for Building E&M Facilities hopes to allow more scholars to understand the potential and application of AI technologies in building energy conservation and challenges facing any large-scale deployment of AI. As much as the competition provides a valuable opportunity for researchers, innovators and industry leaders to exchange ideas, it also aims to release a unique dataset on building operations, thereby making it possible for a wide range of scholars to participate in the research and development of smart building technologies and in introducing semantic AI platforms to smart buildings.

Participants of the competition were each required to develop a semantic AI model to predict the cooling demand of a commercial building. The projects and presentations were evaluated in terms of semantic AI application, innovation, model design, and resources being used, etc. Prof. Wang’s team developed a physics-informed machine learning model to predict building load. The domain knowledge was encoded by careful feature engineering. Hyper-parameter tuning and ensemble learning was applied to enhance model accuracy.

Our heartfelt congratulations to the team for the outstanding achievement!