Towards a Standard for Smart Buildings

As part of our Sidewalk Talk Idea Tour on Energy Efficient Neighborhoods (12/13/17), Kathy Farrington, who leads an internal program at Google to make the company’s buildings smarter, outlined the challenges currently facing smart buildings — in particular, the siloed nature of building devices and applications — and presented a more horizontal approach to the problem. Kathy focuses on how the industry must address security standards, open schemas, education gaps, and device management to reach the next level. Referencing a recent white paper outlining Google’s security standards for IoT devices, she concluded with a call to action: we must build consensus on enterprise requirements to push manufacturers to create better, safer smart building products.