SENSYS

On behalf of the Organizing Committee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Second ACM International Conference on Embedded Systems For Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys '15), in Seoul, South Korea. Over the past six years, BuildSys established itself as the premier workshop for researchers, developers, and practitioners across interdisciplinary fields to present research results and exchange ideas in all information-driven aspects of the buildings. 2014 marked the first year for BuildSys as a full ACM conference. BuildSys this year has broadened its scope significantly to include all systems within the built environment, including buildings as well as other infrastructure systems such as water, power, transportation that will make up the "smart city" of the future.

What sets BuildSys apart from other systems conferences, however, is its distinctive interdisciplinary nature as it draws upon a mix of computer and information researchers on one hand and infrastructure domain practitioners on the other. BuildSys continues to be co-located with ACM SenSys, the leading conference on embedded sensing that helped nurture BuildSys in its formative years and now continues to see BuildSys'15 emerge as a peer conference.

We have assembled what we believe is an exceptional technical program including contributions from researchers from both industry and academia, and from all parts of the globe. This year the committee has succeeded in bringing together research contributions from a wide variety of disciplines that intersect the rapidly evolving domain of energy efficiency in buildings. The range of work to be presented at BuildSys '15 builds from the conference's roots in embedded sensing to include papers that discuss control of built systems, social/behavioral aspects of energy use across a range of networked infrastructure, the interaction between built environments and other utilities, and adoption of emerging new technologies such as data-driven modeling and control. It is our hope that by casting this wider net, we will foster an expanded and ever stronger BuildSys community.

We received a total of 84 submissions, the highest number of submissions ever! These submissions came from all corners of the world, with several papers representing international collaboration by authors from different countries. Specifically, 46 of the 84 papers have authors from outside the US, and every continent is represented. These statistics reflect the universality of the energy efficiency challenge for built environments, the global reach of products and systems to address new opportunities, the tremendous diversity of buildings across the world, and the technological, socioeconomic, and regulatory landscape they operate in. Of the 84 papers we received, 18 were short papers (4 pages), a category of papers meant to encourage oral presentation of high quality research, whose key ideas can be expressed more succinctly. The quality of the submissions was impressive and resulted in 20 regular papers and 6 notes papers being accepted. The paper selection followed a rigorous process involving at least four detailed written reviews and oral discussion of each paper by an international Technical Program Committee (TPC) whose 31 members deflected diverse technical areas. We thank the TPC members for their contribution of time and expertise.

Complementing the oral presentation track is a set of extended abstracts presented in the form of posters and demos. Each abstract is highlighted with a very brief oral presentation in a 2-minute madness session, a tradition we started a couple of years ago. Vibrant poster/demo sessions have played a key role in nurturing BuildSys during its formative years as a workshop, and represent an interesting and entertaining break from our formal technical program. This year we are happy to support a significant growth in this exciting aspect of BuildSys '15, with at least 15 demos and posters. These were selected from submissions in response to a separate Call-for-Posters/Demos with the review process led by the Poster/Demo Chair with the help of select members of the organizing committee.