Passive House; what is it and how does it work?

Brian Uher, ECORE Living

4:00pm Wednesday 20 July 2011
MD Clean Energy Technology Incubator, UMBC South Campus

Brian Uher will discuss the engineering and design principles behind Passive House – a rigorous building performance standard that ECORE Living is deploying in the Mid-Atlantic region.

The term passive house (Passivhaus in German) refers to the rigorous, voluntary, Passivhaus standard for energy efficiency in a building. It results in very low (<80%) energy requirements for space heating or cooling. Any building can be constructed to the standard. Passive design is not an attachment or supplement to architectural design, but a design process that is integrated with architectural design. Although it is mostly applied to new buildings, it has also been used for retrofits. As of August 2010, there were approximately 25,000 such certified structures of all types in Europe, while in the United States there were only 13. ECORE Living is in negotiations with several developers in the DC and Baltimore areas for initial implementation in this region.

Brian Uher is a co-founder of ECORE Living, LLC, a subsidiary of ECORE Ventures. He has developed methods for incorporating return-on-investment with standard energy modeling and auditing techniques to quantify and extend the value of intelligently applied sustainable building techniques, including market projections and capital project analyses. Brian has spoken widely to the real estate and development communities with a focus on a market-based approach to selling green and high performance building. He is currently working on several deep retrofit projects and is developing Passive House optimization strategies for East Coast row houses that will be deployed at scale in 2011 and 2012.

Brian is a LEED accredited professional, HERS/RESNET certified, BPI analyst and envelope professional and taught the Green Remodeling course for the Washington DC chapter of National Association of the Remodeling Industry. He is also a certified Passive House Consultant (residential and commercial standards), the most rigorous performance standard available today. He holds a masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and the Wharton School of Management, holds a master's of science degree in molecular biology from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Chicago.

The Khan Academy is starting to publish a series of short instructional videos on computer science topics. The Introduction to Programming and Computer Science category currently has just 18 videos and these are all on basic programming topics in Python.

Salman Khan's popular Khan Academy site has more than 2100 short videos covering "everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history." The Academy is a not-for-profit organization that describes itself this way.

"The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We're a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere. All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge."

Most of these videos are done by Salman Khan himself and CS in one of the topics he knows the most about, having BS and MS degrees from MIT in computer science (as well as Mathematics and EE). An example of one of the new CS videos is this six-minute one on writing a factorial function using recursion.

These videos won't replace traditional ways of learning computer science, but they can be helpful. I hope to incorporate some of them in the undergraduate courses I teach.

The CSEE Department wishes to extend its congratulations to Dr. Marie desJardins for her recent promotion from associate professor to full professor. Dr. desJardins began teaching at UMBC in 2001 as an assistant professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and since then has taught courses in areas such as artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems and computer programming. As director of the Multi-agent, Planning and Learning lab (MAPLE) at UMBC, Dr. desJardins works with students to find AI solutions to real world problems. In addition to teaching, Dr. desJardins has actively been pursuing research in the areas of multi-agent systems, machine learning, and planning.

Throughout her decade-long career at UMBC, Dr. desJardins has been an active member of several university organizations and committees. From 2008 to 2010, she served as the Undergraduate Program Director for the Computer Science program. Currently, she is a member of the CSEE Executive Committee, the UMBC Faculty Affairs Committee and the CWIT Internal Advisory Board. Dr. desJardin’s numerous contributions to the CSEE Department, whether through teaching, research or committee involvement, have not been overlooked and the Department is confident that she will excel as she takes on her new role this July.

To learn more about Dr. desJardins’ research pursuits, read her research profile.

Dr. Marc Olano is the director of the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department's Game Development Track and has been pursuing research in computer graphics and computer hardware for more than twenty years. Currently, he is working at Firaxis Games on texture compression for the Civilization V video game and collaborating with Dr. Erle Ellis of the Geography and Environmental Systems Department on a project dubbed Ecosynth.

To read more about Dr. Olano's research pursuits, see his full research profile. 

Dr. Tim Oates, associate professor of computer science, does research in the field of machine learning and is interested in understanding the development of the human brain. Dr. Oates is also fascinated by the idea of making robots that are capable of learning and exhibiting human characteristics.  “I don’t know if we’ll ever have androids walking among us that are indistinguishable from humans,” says Dr. Oates, “but I bet we’ll get pretty darn close."

To read more about Dr. Oates' research pursuits, see his full research profile.

The UMBC CSEE Department will be publishing a series of short research profiles describing the research activities of its faculty and students. The first features Professor Marie desJardins and the work of her Multi-Agent, Planning and Learning Lab at UMBC, where she works on developing A.I. solutions to real world problems. Dr. desJardins is especially interested in collaborating with students and helping them develop their own research interests. She says that nearly ninety-five percent of her research is with students. “I like the students to learn about a problem and find something that they think is interesting,” she says.

Computerworld has a story that discussed the passing of the Basic programming language and asks How are students learning programming in a post-Basic world?.

Basic was developed at Dartmouth in the mid 1960s as a language that would be easy to learn and use so that virtually anyone could learn to program. It was also relatively easy to implement a Basic interpreter for a new computer. Bill Gates and Paul Allen famously got their start by creating a Basic interpreter for one of the first micro-computers, the Altair 8800. It was also useful. I remember helping on a complicated sponsored research project at the University of Illinois in the 1970s that was done in Basic on a Wang mini-computer using giant 8 inch floppy disks.

The subhead on the Computerworld story is "Basic is (mostly) dead. Long live Python as the next starter language?" and it describes how many universities are now using Python as the language of choice for introducing people to programming. Count the UMBC CMSC program among them. Two years ago we revamped CMSC201 to use Python as the language for teaching programming concepts and practices, ending a nearly 15 year run using C.

What we liked about Python was that students can write simple, useful programs almost immediately without having to master a large number of new concepts or programming scaffolding. Its interactive, interpreter-based paradigm (just like Basic!) encourages students to explore and get "close to the machine" (just like Basic!). At the same time, Python is a powerful language that elegantly includes nearly all of the modern programming language ideas and also efficient enough for all but the most demanding applications. This combination of simplicity, power and efficiency combine to make Python very popular for software development in industry.