Lan Lan

2papers

2 Papers

SYOct 25, 2016
Policy Design for Controlling Set-Point Temperature of ACs in Shared Spaces of Buildings

Wayes Tushar, Wang Tao, Lan Lan et al.

Air conditioning systems are responsible for the major percentage of energy consumption in buildings. Shared spaces constitute considerable office space area, in which most office employees perform their meetings and daily tasks, and therefore the ACs in these areas have significant impact on the energy usage of the entire office building. The cost of this energy consumption, however, is not paid by the shared space users, and the AC's temperature set-point is not determined based on the users' preferences. This latter factor is compounded by the fact that different people may have different choices of temperature set-points and sensitivities to change of temperature. Therefore, it is a challenging task to design an office policy to decide on a particular set-point based on such a diverse preference set. As a result, users are not aware of the energy consumption in shared spaces, which may potentially increase the energy wastage and related cost of office buildings. In this context, this paper proposes an energy policy for an office shared space by exploiting an established temperature control mechanism. In particular, we choose meeting rooms in an office building as the test case and design a policy according to which each user of the room can give a preference on the temperature set-point and is paid for felt discomfort if the set-point is not fixed according to the given preference. On the other hand, users who enjoy the thermal comfort compensate the other users of the room. Thus, the policy enables the users to be cognizant and responsible for the payment on the energy consumption of the office space they are sharing, and at the same time ensures that the users are satisfied either via thermal comfort or through incentives. The policy is also shown to be beneficial for building management. Through experiment based case studies, we show the effectiveness of the proposed policy.

IVDec 25, 2025
Enabling Ultra-Fast Cardiovascular Imaging Across Heterogeneous Clinical Environments with a Generalist Foundation Model and Multimodal Database

Zi Wang, Mingkai Huang, Zhang Shi et al.

Multimodal cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging provides comprehensive and non-invasive insights into cardiovascular disease (CVD) diagnosis and underlying mechanisms. Despite decades of advancements, its widespread clinical adoption remains constrained by prolonged scan times and heterogeneity across medical environments. This underscores the urgent need for a generalist reconstruction foundation model for ultra-fast CMR imaging, one capable of adapting across diverse imaging scenarios and serving as the essential substrate for all downstream analyses. To enable this goal, we curate MMCMR-427K, the largest and most comprehensive multimodal CMR k-space database to date, comprising 427,465 multi-coil k-space data paired with structured metadata across 13 international centers, 12 CMR modalities, 15 scanners, and 17 CVD categories in populations across three continents. Building on this unprecedented resource, we introduce CardioMM, a generalist reconstruction foundation model capable of dynamically adapting to heterogeneous fast CMR imaging scenarios. CardioMM unifies semantic contextual understanding with physics-informed data consistency to deliver robust reconstructions across varied scanners, protocols, and patient presentations. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that CardioMM achieves state-of-the-art performance in the internal centers and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen external settings. Even at imaging acceleration up to 24x, CardioMM reliably preserves key cardiac phenotypes, quantitative myocardial biomarkers, and diagnostic image quality, enabling a substantial increase in CMR examination throughput without compromising clinical integrity. Together, our open-access MMCMR-427K database and CardioMM framework establish a scalable pathway toward high-throughput, high-quality, and clinically accessible cardiovascular imaging.