IES Research Symposium
Orlando, Florida
Hilton Orlando Buena Vista – Disney Springs
April 10-12, 2022
With technology developing at an accelerating pace and overtaking all aspects of our lives, the IES Research Symposium offers a unique opportunity to delve into the latest research to understand the complexity of change, opportunities, and risks for the lighting industry. This symposium presents research, trends, and case studies on topics such as adaptive lighting, Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics and machine learning, Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR), smart buildings and smart cities. Current findings related to the usage of intelligence in lighting informs future design and research directions with the goals of achieving high-quality spaces for people, protecting the environment, driving additional energy savings, and how the lighting community can evolve to meet these new opportunities. The IES Research Symposium offers a platform for exchanging ideas and connecting individuals and organizations involved in or impacted by this type of research.
DAY 1 - APRIL 10th
In day one, we will focus on design considerations. The morning session will present opportunities to leverage parametric design and automation to improve workflows and efficiency, while also freeing up designers to focus on creativity and optimization of the design itself.
Thomas Paterson
Director/Designer, Lux Populi
Session Description: Our current understanding of Artificial Intelligence, both as a design tool and an operational processing environment is deeply flawed. The tools functioning as heuristics without insight. An understanding of the effect of light in the built environment first demands an understanding of the human in the operating world.
Dan Weissman
Senior Partner/Director - Lam Partners/Lam Labs
Session Description: Architecture is reliant upon light to give it form, to allow us to understand its nuances, spatial qualities, and material conditions. However, lighting designers have historically relied on “calcs” to verify design decisions, which created a feedback loop wherein mathematical (and now digital) modeling tools consistently led practitioners to generic solutions that rely on the uniformity of light at the task plane, without a robust method of assessing the impacts of the luminous environment in three dimensions. Over the past three decades, tools for lighting visualization have become more robust and sophisticated, such that at this point we have arguably plateaued, working successfully with advanced physically-based, photometrically accurate, rendering software to visualize design solutions practically in real-time with a high degree of resolution. Where do we go from here? What does the design community need in the coming decade to ever-more faithfully anticipate how light operates in the real world? Through this session, we will touch on where we started with digital tools, where we’re at now, and where we’d like to be headed in the future.
Justin Brown
Principal - Lam Partners/Lam Labs
Session Description: Heliotropic shading: Daylighting a Rare Books Reading Room with Electrochromic Glass, Parametric Analysis and Design Intervention. A Case Study of the design process for a dynamic, environment-adapting facade, where simulation data becomes the control data. This project presented an opportunity to execute a fundamentally new and unique method for solar control that is perfectly tuned to its locale and adapted to the architecture. The patterns created are a constantly evolving expression of the exact daylight control needed at each moment.
Azadeh Omidfar Sawyer
Assistant Professor of Building Technology – Carnegie Mellon University
Session Description: Creating and evaluating the architectural spaces in which we spend more than 90% of our lives—an astonishing reality of contemporary lifestyle—is a mixture of art and engineering. We have a better understanding of the engineering aspects in the sense that we know, more or less, how to make spaces functional in terms of intended use, temperature, how much light is present, security, and evaluation of energy consumption and demand, among others. But our knowledge regarding the relations between the subjective reactions (sensory/perceptual experience) of people and physical stimuli is less complete, with a disconnect between environmental values measured through simulation and users’ sensory and perceptual experiences of the environment. This presentation proposes an integrative methodology using simulation and survey that goes beyond creating energy-efficient buildings to designing holistic sustainable environments that support occupants’ physiological and psychological wellbeing.
Jason Read
Principal Designer, Disney Imagineering
Session Description: Walt Disney Imagineering is the combination of creative imagination with technical know-how. Get a peek behind the curtain on how the lighting team at Imagineering uses technology to create beautiful guest experiences.
DAY 2 - APRIL 11th
In day two, we will focus on experience and operation. The morning session will examine how advanced controls and intelligent lighting systems can be leveraged to improve and customize occupant experience. Can a lighting system anticipate needs, can it have situational awareness, can it evolve?
Steve Lydecker
Senior Vice President Applied Technology – Acuity
Session Description: Lighting systems by virtue of being powered, always present and ideally located in the built environment is increasingly being used for Real Time Location Services. The ability to precisely locate people, points of interest and mobile assets creates transformational experiences indoor in the same way that outdoor GPS mapping has impacted our daily lives. Where am I? Where is it? and How do I get from here to there?
Alison Zimpfer
Smart Building IoT Solutions Executive - Seimens
Session Description: The use of lighting fixture integrated sensing platforms are proving to be invaluable in the management of buildings. In addition to lighting control, data for effective space utilization, daylighting and even HVAC control strategies can become a critical part of improving building operational efficiency. This talk highlights how these sensing systems are deployed and provides some examples of how they can improve building operational efficiencies.
Wouter Soer
Illumination Product Development Director, Lumileds
Session Description: Digital light sources based on segmented LEDs with suitable projection optics and controls can generate dynamic light distributions for a wide variety of lighting applications. This presentation will review recent progress in developing a full-function digital light source for general illumination.
DAY 3 - APRIL 12th
Day three will consider the entire lifecycle of intelligence in lighting, and ultimately, the feedback loop in the design -> implement -> operate -> inform lifecycle. How does this wave of data enable us to make more informed decisions on our next designs, and how do we consider operational outcomes in inform our new design concepts?
Farukh Aslam
CEO – Sinclair Holdings
Session Description: This talk will describe how IoT, smart systems, and rapid innovation in the built environment are addressing energy sustainability and human health and wellbeing by transforming buildings. A vision of where these technological processes are moving will be presented, and examples of how this transformation is unfolding today will be presented.
IES Vaccination Policy for In-Person Events
The Illuminating Engineering Society takes the health and safety of its members, staff and event attendees very seriously. After careful consideration, the IES Board of Directors has decided to allow in-person attendance at this year's Research Symposium by fully-vaccinated individuals only.
