When: Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Where: PGH 563
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM

Effectiveness of a Task-based Residential Energy Efficiency Program in Oahu

Speaker: Hessam Mohammadmoradi

Energy wasted through buildings is one of the main sources of energy wastage and most of the times people are not aware of inefficiencies and energy wastage in their homes. Energy saving programs are designed to make people aware about energy wastage in their properties. The key factor in the effectiveness of energy saving programs is user engagement. In this paper, we design several energy saving activities considering simplicity as a critical goal. To evaluate the effectiveness of proposed energy saving guidelines, volunteers at Oahu, Hawaii are provided smart meters and are asked to follow proposed activities in their daily life. Evaluation results indicate that the designed program helps users to save energy and simplicity of our designed activities boosted up participation rate to 35%.

Bio:

Since joining the University of Houston in Fall 2013, Hessam is conducting research in area of wireless and sensor networks. His current interest is smart buildings and indoor localization techniques. Hessam received his bachelor in Information technology engineering from University of Tehran and his Master's degree in information technology engineering from Sharif University of Technology.

Correlation Study on Attributes of Unsteady Flows

Speaker: Marzieh Berenjkoub

In this work, we extend the existing spatial correlation quantification metrics, i.e. the Local Correlation Coefficient (LCC), to spatio- temporal domain, and introduce a new metric for the quantification of the correlation of vector-valued attributes for unsteady flows. In addition, we compute the mutual information between pairs of attributes over time to analyze their temporal correlations. We have applied our correlation quantification metrics to a number of 2D and 3D unsteady flows to assess its usefulness.

Bio:

Marzieh Berenjkoub is a Ph.D. student at the University of Houston, studying computer science and scientific visualization under Professor Guoning Chen. Her research interests include data visualization, large-scale scientific simulations, and high performance computing and computer graphics.