Who is 'smarter', humans or buildings?: A mixed method assessment of occupant behavior in smart building environments.

Given the building sector's significant impact on energy consumption and CO2 emissions, there is a clear need for a sustainable solution. Here, smart building technologies are emerging as a promising response, as they offer the potential to improve operational efficiency while reducing environmental impact. However, the development of smart...

A Recipe for Sustainable Living: An Architectural Recipe for Nudging Towards Pro-Environmental Behavior in Housing

The rapid change in climate change and negative impact on the natural environment is attributable to human behavior. The current demands on nature are compromising the well-being of humanity’s future and putting the existence of mankind at risk. The current unsustainable way of living can be changed into a more desired, sustainable lifestyle by...

Water Use Efficiency: A Review of Contextual and Behavioral Factors

Water withdrawals around the world have increased almost twice as fast as the population during the last century. Higher than expected water demand is leading to water scarcity and causing rapid depletion of water tables around the world. One reason behind the higher than expected demand is the inefficient use of water. Inefficient use of...

What employees do today because of their experience yesterday: How incidental learning influences train driver behavior and safety margins (a big data analysis)

Employee behavior plays an important role in the occurrence and prevention of incidents, affecting safety margins. In this study, we examine the potential impact of incidental learning on human behavior in the presence of variation in task design. Incidental learning is the day-to-day on-the-job learning that occurs unintentionally. This...

Humanizing Algorithmic Matching in an Online Dating App

When building online systems designers have to make many decisions that impact user experience. One of said choices is whether certain interactions are automated or remain human. To make matters more complicated, they can also decide to make certain interactions seem automated or human. Making the right decision has increased in importance as...

Empower people's perception of air and ability to improve indoor air quality

Air pollution is a widely accepted problem in today’s world. Nine out of ten people does not breathe healthy air due to rapid urbanization and human activities that cause increased severe air pollution. Over the years people have had a tendency to comfort themselves with everything they need inside. However, they may not be aware that the amount...

How humans use preview information in manual control

The introduction of ever-advancing automatic control systems is rapidly changing traditional manual control tasks such as piloting of aircraft and steering of cars. In order to predict how human controllers will interact with new technology, a thorough understanding of the human’s adaptive manual control capabilities and limitations is essential...

Adaptive Cruise Control in Practice: A Field Study and Questionnaire into its influence on Driver, Traffic Flows and Safety

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) is a system present which enables the car to autonomously maintain a certain speed, and based on the location and the speed of the predecessor, change the speed of the vehicle. This research is meant to determine the influence of ACC on the behavior of the driver, and on flows and safety on the road. Three databases...

Talking with a Virtual Human: Controlling the Human Experience and Behavior in a Virtual Conversation

Virtual humans are often designed to replace real humans in virtual reality applications for e.g., psychotherapy, education and entertainment. In general, applications with virtual humans are created for modifying a person's knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, emotions or behaviors. Reaching these intended goals, however, strongly depends on being...

Time use and movement behaviour of young people in cities: The application of GPS tracking in tracing movement pattern of young people for a week in Aalborg

Intelligent methods for automated video surveillance

At the Man Machine Interaction research group at the Delft University of Technology research is being done on the subject of aggression detection in trains. The goal of this project is to research different aspects of train surveillance, including video surveillance, but also audio surveillance storyboard based modeling. This thesis discusses...

An experimental analysis of human monitoring behavior in multivariable failure detection tasks

This report deals with the results of an experimental program designed to validate a model of the human observer and decision maker formulated in terms of linear estimation and classical sequential decision theory. The experiment comprised a variety of monitoring tasks in which the subjects had to detect and diagnose the occurrence of ramp...