Innovation and inspiration at the Digital Building of the Future conference

The building of the future is sustainable, smart, safe, flexible and comfortable. This is the message that visitors to the Digital Building of the Future conference will take home with them. Would you like to know what else was on the programme? Then read on for a brief summary of the day.

The brand new Valk Exclusief hotel Eindhoven-Best impresses. With fifteen floors and an area of over 26,000 m2, you cannot miss the hotel. The inside is stylishly decorated with organic shapes and natural materials. Via a beautiful round wooden staircase in the central hall I walk to the first floor, where the conference takes place. The information market offers a wide range of technological solutions: from building management systems to climate control and fire protection.

Lean bricks

“The hospital of the future is a system and not a building,” says Harry van Goor. The emeritus professor, affiliated with Radboud university medical center, proposes a different way of thinking to those present. “We are facing serious challenges in healthcare. We will soon have to provide more care with fewer people.” Through a number of quick videos, Harry shows what our care will look like in the future. We see how a patient receives a video consultation from a humanoid, wearables monitor our heart rate and breathing at all times and the hospital of the future builds itself with robots and 3D printers.

According to Harry, it is important to think about these future technologies now. “The mantra bricks, bytes and behavior must be reversed and start with behavior. Start thinking now about future work processes and what technology you need for this. Only then do you look at the stones.” Harry concludes that we do not necessarily need fewer bricks, but... lean bricks. “The hospital of the future is a virtually connected care and health system. Buildings are just part of that.”

Source of information

The audience includes building owners, system integrators, facility managers and building users from various sectors. During the break I speak with two visitors who are looking for solutions for operating rooms and cleanrooms. Because these must become more energy efficient and technological solutions from the exhibitors can help with this. There are also two visitors from Jarola Group, both visiting the conference for a different purpose. Niels van der Weide is facilities manager: “We are working on the construction of a new head office. The lectures are very interesting, because we encounter the same issues. For example, how do you deal with working from home and occupancy?" His colleague Rudolf van de Velde is a product specialist manager and visits the event from a different perspective: “A day like today is a source of information. Here I see where the market is going, I can't find that out at my desk.”

BREEAM

As host, the General Manager of the Valk Exclusief hotel Eindhoven-Best himself will also speak. “It is great that we can organize this day within our walls,” says Lars Binda. Lars worked on the construction of the hotel for four years. “I was involved from the very first pile to the final interior choices. As a large hotel chain, we can make a difference in the field of sustainability and we have an exemplary role. That is why the choice to build BREEAM was easy.” Lars explains that the responsibilities in the field of BREEAM are shared by the architect, project developer and client. “It started with the drawings at the architectural firm. That was a fun puzzle.”

The AI revolution

On the screen we see two futuristic looking buildings. It is a high-rise building, with lots of greenery, glass and warmly lit spaces. Ralf Zoetekouw from Datacation asks the audience if they know the building on the left. Three attendees cautiously raise their hands. “The images were generated with AI,” says Ralf, and the audience starts to chuckle. “My mission is to inspire you and show you how to apply AI technologies.”  

Ralf Zoetekouw divides AI technology into three domains: natural language processing, optimization and computer vision. He shows various applications for these technologies. For example, there is an email classifier that categorizes thousands of emails based on content, a tool for planning routes and a model that recognizes rust or erosion on drone images of a large industrial site. Finally, he presents a number of concrete applications in building automation. Ralf concludes with an interesting comparison: “The industrial revolution is in the past. We are currently in a new revolution, namely the AI revolution.”  

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