Proptech and New York’s Next Mayor: An Unprecedented Opportunity Looms

New York City property owners are pouring money into myriad new technologies that manage the construction process, control building access, and lower energy consumption.

The first step in identifying waste is collecting and analyzing data from buildings. Semiha Ergan, an associate professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, has been studying how embedded systems play a role in the operations and maintenance of buildings. Last year, her students examined historical data on the energy use of building components and broke it down to spot patterns.

Then, they built models with pattern analysis to cluster the data in order to see how, and during which periods, a building was using the most energy.

“We could identify highly occurring configurations over the days and years, and see the corresponding energy usage pattern,” Ergan said. “We had low, medium and high consumption categories, and figured out the configurations to eventually reduce energy use of the building.”