Sunday, May 18, 2025

HBI Lab published a major report on energy/emissions associated with telework

In partnership with three government departments--PSPC, CRA, and TBS--we quantified the energy and emissions impact of various telework and hybrid work models. The report can be found here:... More

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Prof. O’Brien is co-leading new IEA project: Human-Centric Buildings for a Changing Climate

More details can be found here:... More

Friday, May 8, 2020

Congrats to Dr. Jayson Bursill and Adrian Soble for successful thesis defences

The HBI Lab congratulates Dr. Jayson Bursill and Mr. Adrian Soble for successfully defending their PhD and MASc thesis, respectively. They have successfully secured jobs (long before graduation). We wish them all the... More

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Hannah Villeneuve, second year Enviro Eng student, publishes journal article on text-mining Airbnb reviews

Congrats to second-year undergraduate environmental engineering student, Hannah Villeneuve, for publishing her first journal article. She developed custom code to text-mine 1.35-million Airbnb reviews to identify patterns and trends for discomfort in homes. Among other things, she showed that reviews with comfort complaints are associated with... More

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Shengbo Zhang wins RDH Scholarship

Shengbo Zhang won an RDH Scholarship! He will be receiving a $3,000 scholarship for his research related to “Assessing Window Design Strategies for Thermal Comfort”. Shengbo is an MASc student at University of Toronto, who is co-supervised by Marianne Touchie and Liam... More

Friday, May 10, 2019

Our NSERC Strategic Project Grant has been funded

See press release for more details:... More

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Brent Huchuk’s work was featured in Corporate Knights magazine

... More

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Brent Huchuk and Tareq Abuimara were awarded ASHRAE Grant-in-aid awards

They are the fifth and sixth students of the HBI Lab to be awarded this US$11,500... More

Friday, March 29, 2019

Congratulatations to Tareq Abuimara for getting the NSERC PGS D scholarship!

Tareq Abuimara, a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Gunay and Prof. O'Brien, is working on occupant modelling for building design practice. He won this prestigious award, along with an Ontario Graduate... More

Monday, October 29, 2018

The HBI Lab hosted the first Experts Meeting of IEA EBC Annex 79 and the OB-18 Symposium

Liam O'Brien, Burak Gunay, and grad students/post-docs hosted the inaugural meeting for Annex 79 at Orange Art Gallery in Ottawa. More information on Annex 79 can be found on the... More

Friday, October 5, 2018

Dr. Aly Abdelalim’s Sankey diagrams won several awards

IBPSA's Project STASIO had a data visualization design competition. HBI Lab alumnus, Dr. Abdelalim, won Honorable Mention and People's Choice Award. Thank you to Autodesk and NSERC for supporting this research. The entry is... More

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Congratulations to Dr. Mohamed Ouf for best paper award at IBPC 2018

Dr. Mohamed Ouf won a best paper award in Syracuse, NY at the International Building Physics Conference 2018. His paper is titled: Generating design-sensitive occupant-related schedules for building performance... More

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Dr. Mohamed Ouf gets assistant professor position at Concordia University

Dr. Mohamed Ouf, a post-doctoral fellow with the HBI Lab since 2017, has taken an offer at Concordia University in the Department of Building, Civil, and Environmental Engineering. He marks the third HBI Lab graduate student or post-doc to receive an assistant professor position in two years. We look forward to collaborating with him... More

Saturday, August 25, 2018

HBI Lab-led project recognized by Environment Minister Catherine McKenna

The HBI Lab-led project, involving Profs. O'Brien, Gunay, and Beausoleil-Morrison and researchers Sara Gilani, Mohamed Ouf, Tareq Abuimara, and Aly Abdelalim, was announced at a ceremony at Carleton. The ceremony included speeches by Prof. Gunay, President Bacon, and the Honourable Minister McKenna. See here for more... More

Tuesday, August 7, 2018

International PhD student tuition reduced to domestic rates starting for new students in September 2018

I'm pleased to report that Carleton is now offering bursaries such that international PhD students starting in September 2018 and beyond will only pay domestic rates (a ~60% reduction). The HBI Lab is always accepting PhD applications. However, positions are competitive and interested applicants should send a copy of all transcripts as well as... More

Monday, July 2, 2018

Justin Berquist won best paper award at the ASHRAE summer conference

Former MASc student Justin Berquist won best student paper award for his paper titled "A Quantitative Model-Based Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD) System for Zone-Level Inefficiencies". Justin now works at National Research... More

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Tareq Abuimara wins OGS

Tareq Abuimara (supervised by Profs. Gunay and O'Brien) won an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, valued at $15-thousand, to help support his PhD... More

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Prof. Liam O’Brien will deliver the keynote at eSim 2018 in Montreal

The keynote focused on the major NRCan-funded occupant modelling project that HBI Lab has been working on for the past... More

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Haily Fernald awarded ASHRAE Grant-in-aid

Haily is a PhD supervised by Prof. Scott Bucking and Liam O'Brien. This prestigious award, valued at US$10,000 supports PhD students and travel to an ASHRAE... More

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Jayson Bursill and Tareq Abuimara awarded IBPSA-Canada student travel awards to attend eSim

... More

Monday, February 5, 2018

Dr. Mohamed Ouf’s article on occupant modelling and code compliance appeared in ASHRAE Journal Feb. 2018

This article identifies some of the loopholes in current building codes and standards with regards to occupant modelling. The result is that we need more stringent requirements on occupant modelling assumptions. Full article... More

Sunday, November 5, 2017

NZEB textbook translated to Chinese

Two years after it was published in English, the book that Prof. O'Brien co-edited with Prof. Andreas Athienitis has been translated into Chinese. The book is called Modeling, Design, and Optimization of Net-Zero Energy... More

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Prof. Liam O’Brien’s book on building occupant behaviour research methods now in print

Prof. O'Brien and two international colleagues have co-edited a textbook titled Exploring Occupant Behavior in Buildings, with topics ranging from sensing devices to research ethics. Several of the book chapters were co-authored by Prof. O'Brien's former PhD students, Burak Gunay (now assistant professor at Carleton) and Sara Gilani (now a... More

Thursday, October 12, 2017

Prof. O’Brien wins the Ontario Building Envelope Council Rising Star Award

This biennially award recognizes individuals that demonstrate exceptional knowledge of the design, construction and performance of the building envelope. More information cab be found... More

Thursday, September 14, 2017

HBI Lab wins major contract with NRCan to explore code and standard implications of occupants

The HBI Lab successfully won a project in the NRCan EIP program to investigate practical aspects of occupant modelling for building design and code compliance. The project is led by Liam O'Brien, Burak Gunay, and Ian Beausoleil-Morrison, in partnership with RWDI, Autodesk, NRC, and NRCan. HBI Lab is pleased to keep recent PhD grads... More

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Isis Bennet and Justin Berquist successfully defended their MASc theses

Congratulations Isis and Justin! Justin will stay on the team to perform an innovative comfort assessment and energy audit of a gymnastics... More

Monday, August 28, 2017

Sara Gilani successfully defended her PhD thesis.

Congratulations, Sara! Dr. Gilani now has a PhD in architecture and PhD in civil... More

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Sara Gilani wins IBPSA-Canada Student Travel Award

... More

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Liam O’Brien wins IBPSA Outstanding Young Contributor Award

Also in the photo are the new Canadian IBPSA Fellows, from left: Prof. Athienitis, Wright, and... More

Friday, June 9, 2017

Four new funded PhD student positions open

We are excited to announced that four PhD student positions have been opened with the HBI Lab, in collaboration with Prof. Burak Gunay. Find them... More

Sunday, May 14, 2017

Jayson Bursill and Zixiao Shi both got ASHRAE Grant-in-aid awards

Congratulations Jayson and Zixiao. The ASHRAE GIA is aimed at supporting outstanding graduate students and is valued at... More

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Justin Berquist won outstanding TA award

Congratulations, Justin! More details to... More

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Aly Abdelalim successfully passed his PhD defence

Aly's thesis, which developed innovative ways to visualize building performance, will be available online soon. His online tool can be found... More

Thursday, March 30, 2017

HBI Lab research poster receives honourable mention at Data Day 4.0

Led by Shawn Shi, the HBI Lab poster entry for Carleton's Data Day 4.0 symposium received an honourable mention. The posted can be downloaded... More

Monday, March 27, 2017

Aly Abdelalim completes online Sankey Diagram tool

In partnership with NRCan and Autodesk, Aly Abdelalim has completed an online tool that allows users to visualize performance of buildings modelled in EnergyPlus. So far the tool works with the Canadian reference office buildings. A feature-limited demo can be found here: http://www.sankeydiagramsexperiments.com/demo.html, while the source code... More

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