Buildings, Energy, and Transportation Systems Research Group

The Buildings, Energy, and Transportation Systems (BETS) research group investigates the design and implementation of networked computer systems to improve the efficiency and sustainability of "built environments"—that is, technology for smart buildings, smart grids, smart transportation, and, more broadly, the Internet of Things. Specifically, BETS aims to develop inter-infrastructure networked systems that allow building, energy, and transportation infrastructures to be aware of each other and work cooperatively for people's convenience and efficient use of resources. The declining cost, growing capability, and rising popularity of embedded, mobile, and wireless technologies make it possible to instrument these infrastructures like never before. These trends, however, open new challenges to leverage these diverse data sources to support inter-infrastructure applications and securely process Big Data to arrive at actionable conclusions. Our approach is to both contribute to the underlying technologies driving these changes and engineer necessary systems around them to effectively integrate building, energy, and transportation infrastructures.

Some (full list) of our active projects are:

E-mission: a mobile platform for observing travel patterns to inform transportation infrastructure development and research
Hamilton: developing wireless embedded systems capable enough to instrument a building at a price point that makes it relevant
XBOS: an eXtensible Building Operating System for integrated management of subsystems within a building, extending to smart vehicles, grids, and cities
WAVE: a system for fine-grained, transitive authorization on the Internet

BETS is a part of the RISE Lab in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. The predecessor to BETS was Software-Defined Buildings (SDB).