A new article, published on USC Viterbi’s site, casts light on an interdisciplinary project that seeks to turn buildings into intelligent, responsive systems. The piece, “Transforming Buildings Into Intelligent Systems: Workspaces to Improve Your Mood,” profiles how researchers are merging sensing, inference, and adaptive control to support occupant well-being.
Central to the effort is Dr. Gale Lucas, now Director of the Technology Evaluation Lab at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). Her work helps ensure that smart environments respond to human occupants in ways that are understandable, comfortable, and aligned with human expectations.
Dr. Lucas traces her academic roots to a BA in Psychology from Willamette University, followed by a PhD in Psychology at Northwestern, and postdoctoral study in Human-Computer Interaction at USC. She joined ICT in 2013 as a researcher in the Affective Computing Lab. Over time, she has broadened her scope: she now holds the rank of Research Assistant Professor in both Computer Science and Civil and Environmental Engineering at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. In addition, she will continue as Co-Director of CENTIENTS, the Center for Intelligent Environments, a cross-disciplinary partnership with USC’s Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
In the newly released USC article, Dr. Lucas is presented as a bridge between sensing/engineering and human experience. She helps guide how systems interpret signals from wearables and ambient sensors and then translate them into adaptive actions — changes in lighting, acoustics, movable partitions, or spatial configuration. Her interest lies less in the “smartness” per se and more in the legibility of responses: does a change feel intuitive, or jarring?
Her perspective is informed by a body of work on how AI can humanize, rather than alienate, systems. In an essay published in 2024, Using AI to Help Humans, Dr. Lucas explored how intelligent systems can be designed to assist decision making, reduce stress, and maintain trust. (Link to essay)
The USC project, formally titled “Embodied Intelligence in Smart Workspaces: Bidirectional Sensorimotor Interactions for Stress Reduction,” is led by Professor Burçin Becerik-Gerber, with Dr. Lucas and Yasser Khan as co-investigators. It is funded by a National Science Foundation grant. Its aim: continuously infer mental states in real time and adapt built environments accordingly.
Dr. Lucas’s contribution is foundational. Without careful design of human-system feedback, adaptive environments risk being inscrutable or even intrusive. Her role ensures the system’s “decisions” remain visible, comprehensible, and attuned to human sensibilities.
If the project succeeds, it may redefine how we think of buildings: not as static backdrops, but as co-adaptive partners. Through Dr. Lucas’s lens, the metric of success will not only be technical efficacy, but human experience.
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