About the lab
HUman Building Synergy Laboratory
Founded in 2022, the lab is where researchers try to build the synergy between humans, AI, and buildings.
Vision
Iron Man had Jarvis. Your building should too.
A building today is a set of rules written before anyone walked in — fixed schedules, fixed setpoints, a thermostat that does not satisfy you. HUBS is built on the conviction that this is an engineering failure — decades old. What replaces it has a name: Synergy.
What Jarvis was to Iron Man, a room should be to you: it knows what you need, acts before you ask, explains itself when questioned, and earns the last word rather than assuming it. Build that, and a building stops being something you operate and becomes something you collaborate with — one that learns a person instead of a set point, makes its case instead of issuing a schedule, and gets better every time somebody overrules it.
Tony Stark had to build Jarvis. Everyone else should only have to walk into a room. That is the work that HUBS envisions.
Mission
The questions we keep asking.
One question per corner of the triangle, and one that belongs to all three.
Of the human
- How do people express their needs?
- How do they differ from each other?
- What makes individuals effective collaborators with buildings?
Of the AI
- How should an AI agent act effectively with humans and buildings?
- What capabilities should AI possess?
- How far can AI go?
Of the building
- What do buildings need?
- How can buildings be seamlessly integrated with AI?
- How can building systems better support and integrate with humans?
Of all three
- How can they be in the positive loop consistently?
- What creates synergies between them?
- Can they be in harmony?
Pillars
What holds the work up.
Human agency
The occupant keeps authority. An override is the most valuable signal the system receives, not a failure of it.
Machine reasoning
Agents that plan under real constraints — grid, cost, physics, other people — and can say what they did and why.
Physical embodiment
Sensing and actuation that reach the scale of a single person, and report back what actually happened.
Synergy
Comfort and energy treated as a win-win to be engineered, not a trade-off to be split.