Gabe Fierro; Photo credit: Max Witt
I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Colorado School of Mines with a joint appointment at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. I work at the intersection of databases, knowledge graphs, the built environment and the Internet of Things. I am driven by building practical, efficient systems with open-source implementations that are proved through real-world deployments.

My research interests include (1) the design and implementation of high-performance databases, including graph and linked-data databases and timeseries databases; (2) IoT platforms that incorporate edge computing and cloud resources; (3) issues of digitization and data management in the built environment; (4) novel datasets or applications of data that motivate new data management techniques and abstractions.

Much of my current research enables novel software-defined sustainability and efficiency practices in the built-environment. This includes developing new data management techniques and systems for buildings, energy, and water systems that leverage semantic metadata and knowledge graphs to enable data interoperability, sharing, and reuse. I’m very interested in how these new data management techniques change the way we develop software in these hetergeneous, complex and cyber-physical settings. I also work on the design of next-generation IoT platforms that incorporate edge computing and cloud resources to support data-driven applications in smart cities and smart buildings.

I am not currently hiring for research positions. If you are curious about research and want to learn more about it, please drop by my office hours!

Projects and Grants

  • Enhancing Data-Driven Science for Water Treatment Pilot Systems with Semantic Metadata Management: Funded by the National Alliance for Water Innovation to research and develop metadata ontologies for water resource recovery systems
  • BuildingMOTIF: open-source SDK for building metadata model creation, storage, visualization, and validation
  • ASHRAE 223P: semantic metadata standard for buildings, developed through the ASHRAE Semantic Interoperability Working Group
  • Brick Ontology: an open-source ontology and data model for data-driven smart building applications
  • Mortar: a testbed and platform for “self-adapting” building analytics: write your code once and run it on 10s or 100s of buildings without changing a line of configuration or code
  • (past) Skewering the Silos (DE-EE0008681) is a DOE grant to continue development of Brick, in particular to expand its interoperability with existing metadata representations (Project Haystack, gbXML, Modelica, OpenBuildingControl/CDL and BuildingSync) and develop additional analytics and controls applications

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Quick Bio

I received my PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2021, advised by Dr. David E. Culler. I was part of the Buildings, Energy and Transportation Systems project and the RISE lab. My dissertation title was Self-Adapting Software for Cyberphysical Systems.

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