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With the support of the Croucher Foundation, The Institute of Future Cities (IOFC) of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), organised the Croucher Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on ‘Smart Building Technology, Management and Fog Computing’ from 24 to 26 January on CUHK campus. The three-day conference gave inspiring lectures to researchers, practising professionals and advanced students on the research frontiers of proprietary networks, fog computing and intelligent computational methods, and on exploring their holistic integration for energy management of buildings in smart cities.

In the opening ceremony, Prof. Chi Yue Chiu, Dean of the Faculty of Social Science, CUHK, delivered a welcoming speech and Prof. Yee Leung, Director of the Croucher ASI and IOFC of CUHK, introduced the theme of the ASI and the research directions of IOFC. This international workshop brought together ten top researchers and practising professionals to give keynote speeches, including Prof. Thomas Auer, Professor for Building Technology and Climate Responsive Design at the Technical University of Munich, Prof. John Ng, former Chief Architect of the Housing Department of HKSAR, Prof. Fu-Yun Zhao, Professor of the School of Power and Mechanical Engineering at Wuhan University, Prof. JeongGil Ko, Department of Software and Computer Engineering, Ajou University, Korea, Dr. Oliver Holland, Research Fellow, Centre for Telecommunications Research at King’s College London, Prof. Clayton Miller, Department of Building, National University of Singapore, Prof. Sid Chau, Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, Prof. Guoliang Xing, Department of Information Engineering at CUHK, Prof. Raymond Yeung, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Information Engineering at CUHK, and Prof. Yang Yang, Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

‘To live smart and healthy, it is of paramount and imminent importance to reduce building energy consumption in order to be sustainable, but yet to maintain a desirable level of human comfort and safety in order to enhance the quality of life. Integrating existing wire networks and open IoT systems into a unified whole is of great scientific and ractical value for optimal building energy efficiency in smart and healthy cities’, said Prof. Yee Leung.

Wired and proprietary field networks have been used to reduce energy consumption in modern-day buildings. They are however lacking in the extensibility, integration and interoperability necessary for the adoption of the rapid advance in open computing systems suitable for the optimal management of energy consumption in buildings. Fog computing is a newly advanced computing technology that offers the opportunity to develop an open IoT network infrastructure that renders a distributed multi-level control and optimisation of energy savings in smart buildings.