The Strategic Plan Goal 5 – Become a More Effective Institution includes a priority initiative called “Effectively Utilize Campus Space,” which strives to identify the opportunities and benefits that flexible work environments can provide, and allocate space based on fair standards and defined outcomes.
One project supporting this priority initiative is the Space Occupancy Pilot, which involves space-use technologies to enhance data environments, evaluate occupancy accurately and at scale, optimize energy demand management and enable data-driven space decisions. The data collected from the pilot will allow space planners, departments, and occupants to review their space uses, occupancy trends, and other patterns related to occupancy over a period of time such as peaks, average use, and total traffic.
Space Occupancy Pilot Program
The planning for the Space Occupancy Pilot launched in October 2024 with the goal of deploying occupancy sensors to five buildings on campus beginning February 2025. This pilot is overseen by the Space Oversight Committee co-chaired by UCLA’s Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost and the Vice Chancellor and Chief Financial Officer. The space occupancy project utilizes occupancy detection devices to provide building and floor occupancy information to:
- Improve the campus's efficiency, sustainability, and functionality.
- Ensure campus resources are used effectively to support the growing needs of students, faculty, and staff.
- Reduce costs, align with sustainability goals and minimize the campus's environmental footprint.
- Facilitate smarter decision-making, resource allocation, and maintenance, ensuring a well-maintained and forward-thinking campus environment.
- Charles Turner (FOS)
- Jack Tchilingirian (FM)
- Amit Singh (FM)
- Robert Striff (FM)
- Sean Wilder (FM)
- Valerie Vahling (ITS)
- Ju Kim (ITS)
- Larry Armstrong (ITS)
- Chris Bates (ITS)
- Hilda Duggan (ITS)
- Chris Lechner (ITS)
- Gerrie Zvara (OED)
- Amanda Ogden (OED)
- Install occupancy sensors in selected UCLA locations.
- Gather occupancy data to assess space utilization.
- Integrate real-time occupancy data with HVAC building controls to minimize energy consumption.
- Contribute to UCLA’s institutional effectiveness and resource efficiency goals.
- Five Buildings total
- Occupancy Data Collected at Full Floor Level or Department Level
- Three Data Collection Systems: ITS WiFi, Occuspace, Butlr
- Test Direct Digital Control (DDC) Integration Capabilities at Young
Building | Data Collection System | Floor Level Data | Department Level Data |
Murphy Hall | Occuspace, ITS WiFi | A, 1, 3, 4 | Floor 2 |
Mathematical Sciences | Butlr, ITS WiFi | 1,2,3 | 4 & RRs |
Young Hall | Bultr, ITS WiFi | Floor level data and DDC in 3 lecture halls | |
Psychology | Occuspace, ITS Wifi | 1, 2, 3, A | n/a |
Life Sciences | Occuspace, ITS Wifi | 1, 5, A | 2, 3, 4 |
Data collected from the space use pilots will inform various analyses and decision processes related to space use, operations, energy use, and space planning. Some examples include:
- Energy reduction and optimization for rooms with integrated heating and air conditioning (HVAC) controls,
- Dynamic service delivery including the flexible deployment of custodial teams to locations with the highest traffic, and
- Space use planning opportunities where underused or unused spaces can be reallocated based on fair standards and defined outcomes.
Data from the pilot project will be safely collected and stored in databases overseen by IT Services. Dashboards will be created to visually display key metrics by building, floor, and neighborhood (zone within a floor). Data will also be shown based on historical trend, daily/hourly use, average occupancy, peak occupancy, and other metrics. The dashboards are under development through Spring 2025 and will be presented to the Space Oversight Committee for their input and feedback. Subsequently, the dashboards will be refined and shared with various stakeholders including the specific building coordinators, chairs, deans, and various operational units involved in the pilot. A broader rollout may occur once the dashboards and primary stakeholders have provided feedback on the dashboard design and data sets.
UCLA selected Occuspace as a sensor vendor for this pilot. To start, these sensors meet UCLA’s privacy policies and requirements related to privacy and securing sensitive data. The vendor provides a layer of privacy protection which anonymizes data for all devices it senses in the zone of the building floor. Some of the safeguards worth noting related to Occuspace sensors include:
- Occuspace collects zero personally identifiable information (PII) and is fully GDPR and CCPA compliant
- Occuspace sensors never connect to any devices, and can only passively observe the Bluetooth (BLE) and WiFi activity in a space being measured
- Occuspace does use a unique identifier for each BLE and WiFi signal being measured. This unique identifier is based on the broadcasted MAC address of each radio
- Modern smartphones, laptops, and other consumer devices randomly rotate the MAC address of the BLE and WiFi radios for consumer protection
- Occuspace further enhances privacy by irreversibly hashing the broadcast MAC addresses into the unique identifiers used in data analysis
- MAC addresses are irreversibly hashed immediately on the sensor itself with the original MAC address value never stored locally or in the cloud
- Hashing is performed with SHA256 and reduced (truncated) in size to make it impossible to reverse
- The sensors only transmit hashed data to the Occuspace cloud
- After hashed data is successfully sent to Occuspace it is permanently deleted from the sensors
Butlr utilizes thermopile technology (body heat signatures) to detect and measure space utilization.
-- Butlr is completely anonymous at the source - ie. +1/-1 technology for a space, not able to ID or track
-- Butlr's data is all hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS-West 2)
-- Butlr sensors communicate to Hives (networking gateways) via a proprietary mesh networking protocol.
-- Butlr is SOCII Type 2 certified and uses industry standard encryption methodologies - both AES-256 encryption for at-rest data and TLSv1.2 for in transit communication.
-- Event data from Butlr sensors is analyzed and computed and output into Butlr's web application platform which is accessible via a username/password.
