2020 Proceedings of the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis hit us on 26th February 2020. Before that day, we had planned to hold SimAUD 2020 as a physical conference at TU Wien, loosely themed around the Fridays for Future movement and its implications for the AEC world. Accordingly, we wanted to avoid handing out conference bags and other plastic giveaways; we also intended to offer only vegan food, not only because it fit the subject but also as a homage to Azam Khan-one of SimAUD's founders whom we invited as a keynote speaker-who is an outspoken proponent of going vegan. As more and more news of lockdowns in Europe came in, our chances for holding the conference physically became slim. When WHO finally declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11th, 2020, we had to choose whether to cancel, postpone, or move the conference online. Canceling was no option since the authors would lose their chance of presenting their work, possibly leading to problems with research funding. This would also apply had we postponed the conference to some later date, e.g. after summer or even one year later; now that we know that COVID-19 is going to be around for quite some time, it seems wise that we did not settle on this option as well. On March 18th, 2020, we decided to make SimAUD2020 into an online conference and fully embrace the advantages of this medium: Availability 24/7 through the use of pre-recorded video presentations, to be discussed in live webinars held during the conference; the ability to sift through papers using data analytics, and-since we speak about data- a new session for discussing datasets handed in together with the papers; a new session for education, which is what most of us use the Internet for nowadays. Strangely, the shift to the online format also made us aware of existing physical borders: Some countries restrict the use of video-sharing platforms and videoconferencing tools, which has made participation impossible for some of our authors. Differences in time zones and daylight savings time regulations also made it necessary to hold each session twice so that authors could participate during their daytime. Twice the amount of sessions would have meant extending the duration of the conference-a no-go if one considers that some sessions are only sparsely filled. Instead, we opted to merge such sessions in order to densify our online schedule (figure 1). The proceedings, however, remained unaffected by this decision, as each of our sessions has its own chapter. Coming to the contents of this Proceedings of the 11th Annual Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design, we see a total of 72 regular papers grouped into 10 chapters (=sessions). We additionally have 4 keynote papers by Christina Hopfe, Ardeshir Mahdavi, Bige Tuncer and Azam Khan. All papers were subject to a double-blind peer review-process (headed by our scientific chairs Christiane M. Herr, Ulrich Pont, Dana Cupkova and Gabriel Wainer). Reviews were conducted by our scientific committee which consisted of 93 reviewers, who ensured the high quality of the conference was kept and proper feedback was provided to all of the authors who handed in (111 submissions, 80 accepted). Individual papers are indexed in the ACM Digital Library after the conference. The actual conference takes place 25-27 May (when measured in UTC; however, in Alaska it starts on May 24 and in New Zealand it ends on 28 May). It features 6 paper discussion sessions that happen twice a day. We warmly thank all authors and chairs for participating in these discussions, as these now form the core of the online conference. These discussion sessions are summarized for the first time in papers panel sessions by each of the respective chairs (the papers panel itself is moderated by our keynote speakers). Another novelty of this year´s conference lies in the appointment of a workshops coordinator (Wolfgang E. Lorenz) to manage our 5 workshop sessions happening in parallel (the rest of the conference is sequential, i.e. single-track). Help was provided by our 5 student volunteers (Jakub Klas, Judith Hofer, Dominik Fill, Androniki Pappa and Myrto Karnoutsou) who are also attending/assisting the live discussions and giving people a sense of presence (actually being at the conference even when physically sitting at home) by using social media to report "who says what" and "what happens where". Lastly, we offer the "SimAUD Educational Community" and "SimAUD Dataset Repository" sessions (both for the first time; the latter is prepared by Anastasia Gassia and Myrto Karnoutsou) in order to further extend the scope of SimAUD. All of this would have not been possible without institutional support. We are incredibly thankful to SCS (Oletha Darensburg and Carmen Ramirez), ACM, IBPSA, TU Wien´s Center for Computational Complex Systems (Niki Popper) and TU Wien´s research unit of Digital Architecture & Planning (Bianca Braun, Peter Kompatscher), and to our exclusive sponsor, Autodesk, for their continuing support of the SimAUD conference.

The COVID-19 crisis hit us on 26th February 2020. Before that day, we had planned to hold SimAUD 2020 as a physical conference at TU Wien, loosely themed around the Fridays for Future movement and its implications for the AEC world. Accordingly, we wanted to avoid handing out conference bags and other plastic giveaways; we also intended to offer only vegan food, not only because it fit the subject but also as a homage to Azam Khan-one of SimAUD's founders whom we invited as a keynote speaker-who is an outspoken proponent of going vegan. As more and more news of lockdowns in Europe came in, our chances for holding the conference physically became slim. When WHO finally declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11th, 2020, we had to choose whether to cancel, postpone, or move the conference online. Canceling was no option since the authors would lose their chance of presenting their work, possibly leading to problems with research funding. This would also apply had we postponed the conference to some later date, e.g. after summer or even one year later; now that we know that COVID-19 is going to be around for quite some time, it seems wise that we did not settle on this option as well. On March 18th, 2020, we decided to make SimAUD2020 into an online conference and fully embrace the advantages of this medium: Availability 24/7 through the use of pre-recorded video presentations, to be discussed in live webinars held during the conference; the ability to sift through papers using data analytics, and-since we speak about data- a new session for discussing datasets handed in together with the papers; a new session for education, which is what most of us use the Internet for nowadays. Strangely, the shift to the online format also made us aware of existing physical borders: Some countries restrict the use of video-sharing platforms and videoconferencing tools, which has made participation impossible for some of our authors. Differences in time zones and daylight savings time regulations also made it necessary to hold each session twice so that authors could participate during their daytime. Twice the amount of sessions would have meant extending the duration of the conference-a no-go if one considers that some sessions are only sparsely filled. Instead, we opted to merge such sessions in order to densify our online schedule (figure 1). The proceedings, however, remained unaffected by this decision, as each of our sessions has its own chapter. Coming to the contents of this Proceedings of the 11th Annual Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design, we see a total of 72 regular papers grouped into 10 chapters (=sessions). We additionally have 4 keynote papers by Christina Hopfe, Ardeshir Mahdavi, Bige Tuncer and Azam Khan. All papers were subject to a double-blind peer review-process (headed by our scientific chairs Christiane M. Herr, Ulrich Pont, Dana Cupkova and Gabriel Wainer). Reviews were conducted by our scientific committee which consisted of 93 reviewers, who ensured the high quality of the conference was kept and proper feedback was provided to all of the authors who handed in (111 submissions, 80 accepted). Individual papers are indexed in the ACM Digital Library after the conference. The actual conference takes place 25-27 May (when measured in UTC; however, in Alaska it starts on May 24 and in New Zealand it ends on 28 May). It features 6 paper discussion sessions that happen twice a day. We warmly thank all authors and chairs for participating in these discussions, as these now form the core of the online conference. These discussion sessions are summarized for the first time in papers panel sessions by each of the respective chairs (the papers panel itself is moderated by our keynote speakers). Another novelty of this year´s conference lies in the appointment of a workshops coordinator (Wolfgang E. Lorenz) to manage our 5 workshop sessions happening in parallel (the rest of the conference is sequential, i.e. single-track). Help was provided by our 5 student volunteers (Jakub Klas, Judith Hofer, Dominik Fill, Androniki Pappa and Myrto Karnoutsou) who are also attending/assisting the live discussions and giving people a sense of presence (actually being at the conference even when physically sitting at home) by using social media to report "who says what" and "what happens where". Lastly, we offer the "SimAUD Educational Community" and "SimAUD Dataset Repository" sessions (both for the first time; the latter is prepared by Anastasia Gassia and Myrto Karnoutsou) in order to further extend the scope of SimAUD. All of this would have not been possible without institutional support. We are incredibly thankful to SCS (Oletha Darensburg and Carmen Ramirez), ACM, IBPSA, TU Wien´s Center for Computational Complex Systems (Niki Popper) and TU Wien´s research unit of Digital Architecture & Planning (Bianca Braun, Peter Kompatscher), and to our exclusive sponsor, Autodesk, for their continuing support of the SimAUD conference.