Dr. Ralph Evins

Title of Talk:

From searching to learning to reasoning: applying optimization, machine learning and GenAI to low-energy buildings

Short Bio:

Dr Ralph Evins was recently appointed as a Full Professor in Civil Engineering at the University of Victoria, where he leads the Energy in Cities group. Over nearly 20 years in academia he’s sat on around 50 committees (a few of them interesting), published 56 journal papers and 85 conference papers together with an amazing team (some of which even get read) and most recently founded a couple of start-up companies (which may one day make some money). His research spans several iterations of the application of computational methods to the built-environment: he started out applying genetic algorithms to the design of low-carbon buildings (which it turns out no-one wanted), spent a decade teaching neural networks to approximate what building simulations already knew, and now spends his time thinking about what large language models can be trusted with (but still has no idea).