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.

• Email: gtfierro -AT- mines -DOT- edu
• Pronouns: he/him
• Github: @gtfierro
• Office: 214E CTLM ; Office Hours 3-4pm Tuesday; 11am-12pm Wednesday
• ORCID: 0000-0002-2081-4525
• Google Scholar
• CV (last updated 2023)

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

News

• [March 2024] Proud to have the ASHRAE 223P draft standard released for advisory public review!
• [February 2024] I was on a panel at the Brains 4 Buildings webinar
• [December 2024] Congratulations to Ethan Richards (ugrad) on getting a poster (“Using Concept Maps for Notional Machine Selection in CS1”) accpeted to SIGCSE 2024!
• [November 2024] Great work to Dimitris Mavrokapnidis for presenting our work on “SeeQ: A Programming Model for Portable Data-driven Building Applications”, published in BuildSys 2023
• [August 2023] Looking forward to teaching CSCI 403 (Introduction to Databases) this Fall
• [June 2023] Honored to have our short paper “A Programming Model for Portable Fault Detection and Diagnosis” accepted to ACM e-Energy 2023, led by Dimitris Mavrokapnidis
• [May 2023] Got back from a fantastic trip to Australia to speak at the IEA Annex 81 plenary and the National Energy Efficiency Conference
• [November 2022] Congratulations to all the authors at DATA 2022. Thanks for a fantastic workshop with many interesting datasets
• [September 2022] Two papers accepted at BuildSys 2022! – see you all in Boston!
• [November 2021] Successful conclusion of the 4th annual workshop on Data: Acquisition To Analysis. Many thanks to the TPC, Artifact Evaluation committee and the authors who submitted and presented!
• [July 2021] I am the co-lead of Activity A3 for Annex 81 “Data-Driven Smart Buildings” through the International Energy Agency
• [May 2021] I graduated from UC Berkeley!
• [April 2021] I gave my dissertation talk (recording available online)
• [March 2021] I have accepted an assistant professor position in the computer science department at Colorado School of Mines, with a joint appointment at NREL!
• [November 2020] I was one of the chairs of the Data: Acquisition to Analysis (DATA) 2020 workshop
• [October 2020] I was one of 11 recipients of the inaugural CMD-IT FLIP Dissertation Fellowship

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.

Resources for Students

• Matt Might’s Illustrated Guide to a PhD
• Advice on technical writing:
  • on systems papers
• Advice on reviewing papers (1, 2)
• Advice on reading papers (1 w/ summary here)
• Advice on writing your dissertation
• Overview of getting a CS PhD in the US
• 10 simple rules for attending your first conference