INFERLab

INFERLab

INtelligent inFrastructure rEseaRch Laboratory

Carnegie Mellon University

Who are we?

Welcome to the Intelligent Infrastructure Research Laboratory (INFER Lab), from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

We are interested in improving the operational efficiency of our physical infrastructure, as well as increasing its resilience, adaptiveness and autonomy. In an increasingly resource-constrained world, our infrastructure systems will need to be able to interact with their environment and with each other in order to maximize their efficiency and minimize risks. Hence, our lab interested in solving these challenges by providing answers to questions such as: (a) how can we utilize the data generated by instrumentation systems to provide better feedback, learn from experience and better plan for the future?, (b) how can we improve and leverage the interconnectedness of our infrastructure?, and (c) to what extent can we utilize the resources that are already present in our infrastructure to help solve these problems?

The INFERLab is led by Prof. Mario Bergés from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Interests

  • Smart Infrastructure
  • Cyber-Physical Systems
  • Structural Health Monitoring
  • Applied Machine Learning

Projects

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Smart City Innovations and Experiments using New Climate and Energy Simulations (SCIENCES)

The project focuses on modelling of the energy consumed by buildings and their outdoor environment at the neighbourhood scale to evaluate strategies that can mitigate urban heat islands and climate change.

Habitats Optimized for Missions of Exploration (HOME)

This project focuses on the development of novel strategies for increasing the autonomy of space habitats; primarily: 1) root cause analysis of faults, and 2) uncertainty quantification in digital twins.

Towards Real-world Reinforcement Learning for Building Control

The project aims to develop enabling methods for practical deployment of reinforcement learning for building control.

Electricity Disaggregation

In this project we focus on a specific class of unsupervised algorithms based on deep learning techniques that can learn instantaneous power waveforms for individual devices as well as their activation patterns given sufficient data from a single meter.

Estimating Climate Change Impacts on Water and Electric Power Infrastructure in the Southeast U.S.

In this project we focus on estimating the effects of climate change on electric power systems.

GridBallast: Autonomous Load Control For Grid Resilience

The GridBallast project will create low-cost demand-side management technology to address resiliency and stability concerns accompanying the growth of distributed energy resources.

Human-in-the-loop Control of HVAC Systems in Commercial Buildings

The primary goal of this project is to design, implement, and evaluate a human-in-the-loop sensing and control system for energy efficiency of HVAC and lighting systems based on a novel depth-imaging occupancy sensor.

Human-in-the-loop Control of HVAC Systems in Commercial Buildings

The primary goal of this project is to design, implement, and evaluate a human-in-the-loop sensing and control system for energy efficiency of HVAC and lighting systems based on a novel depth-imaging occupancy sensor.

Infrastructure monitoring for damage assessment from sensors on-board vehicles

This project targets the development of a metadata inference framework to provide operational information, i.e., the metadata associated with sensors and actuators.

SHADE: Surface Heat Assessment for Developed Environments

Through this project, we seek to develop an integrated framework for predicting extreme temperature risks in urban areas.

Strategic Methane Gas Pipeline Replacement Planning: Analytics and Monitoring

This project focuses on the development of statistical models for relating pipeline infrastructure characteristics and the results of methane leak detection surveys.

Understanding Electricity Demand Patterns Coupled With On-Site Solar Generation

In this project we study the potential of existing datasets to provide information necessary for decision-making in different contexts: from solar home systems for low-income rural residents in Africa, to utility net-metering datasets from United States households.

Meet the Team

Principal Investigators

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Mario Bergés

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Machine Learning, Statistical Inference, Smart Infrastructure

Researchers

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Guillermo Montero

Postmaster Research Associate

Structural Health Monitoring, Signal Processing, Structural Dynamics, System Identification, Machine Learning

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Isabel Madeleine Runge

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Cyber-Physical Security, Building Automation Systems, Digital Twins, Machine Learning

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Miguel Martin

Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Urban Building Energy Modelling, Coutermeasures to Urban Heat Islands and Climate Change, Smart City Digital Twins

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Yu Hou

Postdoctoral Research Associate

3D Modeling and Simulation, Computer Vision and Graphics, Digital Twins and Smart Infrastructure

Graduate Students

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Elvin Vindel

PhD Student

Demand Flexibility, Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings, Building Energy Modeling, Renewable Energy

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Byeongseong Choi

PhD Student

Smart Cities & Infrastructures, Statistical & Probabilistic Model, Regional Risk Analysis

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Min Hwang

PhD Student

Fault Detection and Diagnosis in HVAC systems, Smart Cities & Infrastructures, Digital Twins

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Jingxiao Liu

PhD Student

Structural Health Monitoring, System Identification, Machine Learning

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Nicolas Gratius

PhD Student

Smart habitats for deep space exploration, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Decision making

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Ozan Baris Mulayim

PhD Student

Smart Grids, Building Energy Management, Digital Twins

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Ronald S. Holt

PhD Student

Deep Learning, Signal Separation, Data Science, Sustainability

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Sizhe Ma

PhD Student

Smart Infrastructure Systems, Digital Twin and Probabilistic Graphical Model in the field of Civil Engineering

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Zhichen Wang

PhD Student

Digital twin in the built environment, Smart infrastructure systems, Computer vision applications in construction

Interns

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Kaiwen Zhang

Independent Study Researcher

Smart Cities, Renewable Energy Applications

Alumni

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Bingqing Chen

Machine Learning Research Scientist

Autonomous Energy Systems, Reinforcement Learning, Distributed Optimization

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Francisco Fonseca

Research Associate

Energy Systems, Operations Research, Data Science, Machine Learning

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Henning Lange

Applied Scientist

Machine Learning, Variational Inference, Energy Systems

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Jingkun Gao

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Building Automation Systems, Statistical Inference, Semantic Technologies

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Jerry Lei

Postdoctoral Research Associate

HVAC Control Logic, Software Testing, Building Automation Systems

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Xuesong (Pine) Liu

Co-founder and CEO

HVAC Systems, Information Modeling, Building Automation Systems, Fault Detection and Diagnosis

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Emre Can Kara

VP of Engineering

Vehicle Electrification, Data Science, Machine Learning

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In-Soo Jung

Senior Data Scientist & Team Lead

Structural Health Monitoring, Data Mining, Dimensionality Reduction Techniques

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Matineh Eybpoosh

Co-Founder & CEO

Energy Storage, Data Science, Machine Learning

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Suman Giri

Head of Data Science (Human Health)

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, Data Science, Healthcare Analytics

Past Visitors

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Laura Simandl

Building Science Engineer

Resilient Building Structures & Systems, Innovative Materials & Testing, Digital Twin Technologies

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Alan Mazankiewicz

Visiting Scholar

Machine Learning on Data Streams, Interpretability in Machine Learning, Multivariate Statistical Dependence Estimation

Recent Publications

Contact

  • 412 268 4572
  • 119 Porter Hall, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213
  • Tuesdays 11:00 to 12:00