The program aims to innovate building technologies for energy efficiency and environmental sustainability, with renewed, greater emphases on technology transfer and commercialization, and closer collaboration with the Singapore agencies. The program also continues to pioneer in major new research directions to continue its leadership in optimal, sustainable, and agile built environment for tropical climates. These new directions are connected by the comprehensive use of data and analytics engines, and by an emphasis on human and behavioral perspective.

SinBerBEST’s mission is to Advance technologies for designing, modeling and operating buildings for maximum efficiency and sustainability in tropical climates. There are 5 research areas under this project:

• Theme A: Human-Building Nexus – Enhancing Health and Productivity in the Built Environment.

» Health, Well-Being and Productivity and Indoor Environmental Quality.

» Benchmark for Occupant Satisfaction in Commercial Building and Elevated Air Movement and Increased Temperature Setpoint.

» Adaptable Cooling Coil under Diverse Load Conditions for Tropical Buildings.

» Solutions to Reduce Exposure to Particulate Matter and Airborne Aerosolized Transmissions.

• Theme B: Smart Technologies for Agile, Intelligent, Efficient and Resilient Buildings.

» Intelligent Self-Learning Sensors with Online Real Time Calibration.

» Holistic Building Energy Management with Adaptive Cooling Control.

» Novel Air Handler for Energy- Efficient ACMV Operation in Tropical Environments.

» Intelligent Grid Interface System for Utility-Customer Power Quality Control.

• Theme C: Agile Design and Operation of the Building Envelope for Energy Efficiency and Human Comfort.

» Lighting Design Strategies Beyond the Visual: Health, Alertness and Efficiency.

» Experimental and Computational platform for novel façade concepts.

• Theme D: Data Analytics for the Built Environment.

» Real-time Estimation of Building System State.

» Preventive Building Maintenance and Fault Detection.

» Learning-Based Thermal Comfort Modeling.

» Virtual Energy Auditing of Existing Building Stock.

• Theme E: Cyber Physical Testbed.

» Physical-Physical and Physical-Computational Testing of Daylight Systems.

» Health, Well-Being, Productivity and Indoor Environmental Quality.

» Lighting Design Strategies beyond the Visual: Alertness and Efficiency.

» Comprehensive Implementation of Living Laboratories.

SinBerBEST is an interdisciplinary group of researchers from UC Berkeley, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), National University of Singapore (NUS), Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT), who come together to make an impact with broadly applicable research leading to the innovation of energy efficient and sustainable technologies for buildings located in the tropics, as well as for economic development. On 1 June 2017, the SinBerBEST program (SBB2) was renewed for five years.