CEEM Seminar | Burcin Becerik-Gerber | USC
From Sensing to Adaptation: Human-Centered Intelligence in the Built Environment
The built environment is increasingly capable of sensing, learning, and responding, creating new opportunities to rethink how buildings and infrastructure are designed, constructed, operated, and experienced. This talk explores research on human-centered intelligent built environments, spanning multimodal sensing and modeling of human experiences, AI-enabled simulation of human behavior and emergency response, adaptive building systems, and human–robot interaction and teleoperation in construction. Across these applications, the work examines how to move beyond systems that simply collect data or automate predefined tasks toward environments and machines that can understand context, anticipate human needs, and adapt their behavior. The presentation will highlight recent advances and remaining challenges in creating built environments where people, machines, and physical spaces can increasingly sense, learn from, and adapt to one another.
Burçin Becerik-Gerber
Dr. Burçin Becerik-Gerber is Professor and Chair of the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, where she holds the Fred Champion Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research focuses on human-centered intelligent built environments, integrating sensing, computational modeling, artificial intelligence, and human–machine interaction to transform how built environments are designed, constructed, operated, and experienced. She pioneered the field of Human-Building Interaction (HBI), an interdisciplinary field that examines the dynamic relationships between people and intelligent, responsive, and adaptive built environments. She has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed publications, with research funded by agencies including the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Transportation, as well as industry partners. She is a member of the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Becerik-Gerber previously held the inaugural Stephen Schrank Early Career Chair and was named a Dean’s Professor in 2020. Her honors include a Los Angeles-area Emmy Award as co-producer of the documentary Lives, Not Grades (2022), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Computing in Civil Engineering Award (2023), the ASCE Peurifoy Construction Research Award (2024), and the ASCE Henry L. Michel Award for Industry Advancement of Research (2024). She was elected to the National Academy of Construction in 2021 and named an ASCE Fellow in 2024.