ETH Alumni in Singapore

Hi everyone, my name is Dr. Clayton Miller! I'm an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore and I just want to give everyone an overview of my career journey, which includes the ETH Zurich, where I did my Ph.D. from 2012-2016. As you can probably tell them from my accent, I'm actually American. However, I ended up in Singapore over 11 years ago to do a research grant at the National University of Singapore in the same department that I'm in now. And that path really opened my eyes to doing degrees and living abroad. Through my experience here in Singapore, I came across the Future Cities Lab (FCL) in Singapore, which is in an ETH Zurich collaborative lab with the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Singapore.

Through that immersion or experience at FCL, I decided to do a Ph.D. at the ETH Zurich in 2012, I ended up at the age due to a fellowship that I applied for and was awarded at the Institute of Technology and Architecture (ITA), which is in the Department of Architecture. This institute is a large group of researchers that focus on the technical aspects of the built environment, from design to construction to operations. A lot of the professors at the ITA are focused on data science, machine learning, and other technical areas of research related to buildings. There is a lot of research focused on digital fabrication, energy modeling, energy systems, structural systems. And it was really a great experience! I was immersed in a lot of really interesting projects while I was in the Institute of Technology and Architecture in Zurich. As part of my fellowship, I was also able to spend quite a bit of my time here in Singapore because of the experience that I had before I started my Ph.D., I was able to leverage some of the data sets that I was working on even before my Ph.D. towards the research that I ended up doing.

These days I have since I've started as an Assistant Professor at an NUS, I have continued the path of research that I started at the ETH Zurich, which is really focused on how we can use different kinds of data from the built environment to improve the energy performance of buildings, to improve the impact that buildings have on their occupants in terms of wellness, satisfaction, and privacy. My group focuses a lot on the use of machine learning and data science towards those objectives. We have a couple of projects, the first is focused on the analysis of large groups of buildings. And this is a project that we created a machine learning competition on the Kaggle platform, which allowed contestants to create solutions and upload the solutions, and have a model score their submissions according to their accuracy. The whole community learned quite a bit. It was kind of what you would call a crowdsourcing effort when it comes to machine learning workflows. And it was a really cool part of the research that I really enjoyed, but also it builds upon some of the things that I learned at the ETH that I started in my Ph.D. The other area of research is focused on the collection of information from occupants that allows us to build models to predict what those people like in the built environment. What keeps them happy when they're inside of a building? What are the temperature levels? What are the light levels, the noise levels, the different things that cause a person to feel satisfied in buildings? So we've developed an Apple Watch-based platform and a Fitbit-based smart-watch smartwatch based platform that allows people to give feedback through the watch based on how they're feeling. It's a methodology called ecological momentary assessments, and it allows us to collect lots of longitudinally intensive data from people. We really want to collect a lot of data about how people feel when they're in the built environment.

The ETH Zurich prepared me for these different research avenues and I'm very grateful for that. It's kept me in touch with a lot of really interesting projects and research that's still happening here in Singapore through the Future Cities Lab and the Future Resilience Systems Lab. There's a new lab called the Future Health Technologies Lab, which is a lot of expertise coming from Switzerland and combining with the expertise we have here in Singapore to address various problems related to health and wellness and resilience in the Singapore context. So thanks for listening! Reach out to me if you have any questions. And thanks for the opportunity to share my ETH Zurich and Singapore experiences.