Hosting Prof. Pieter de Wilde, Prof. Alfonso Capozzoli, and Dr. Marco Savino Piscitelli at NUS

It was a pleasure to host Prof Pieter de Wilde, Prof Alfonso Capozzoli, and Dr. Marco Savino Piscitelli at the NUS College of Design & Engineering this week.

Pieter spoke on “Challenges in Building Performance Simulation: AI and the Energy Performance Gap”, while Alfonso and Marco presented “Scalable, Transparent, High-Performance HVAC Control for Energy-Responsive Buildings: Barriers and Pathways to Large-Scale Adoption”.

The visit provided an excellent platform for our faculty, PhD students, and postdocs to exchange ideas and explore avenues for collaboration.

As part of their visit, Pieter delivered a talk where he shared insights on AI and its implications for building simulation, connecting it to the energy performance gap and the need to move beyond technological innovation towards real-world impact.

Alfonso and Marco also gave a joint talk highlighting the challenges that Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) face in practice due to their complexity and lack of interpretability, and presented how their research addresses these issues through approaches such as rule extraction, transforming complex control logics into transparent and transferable strategies.

We look forward to deepening the collaboration between our research labs and building on these exchanges.