The 6^th ACM International Workshop on

Big Data and Machine Learning for Smart Buildings and Cities (BALANCES'26)

Welcome to ACM BALANCES 2026

The proliferation of urban sensing, IoT, and big data in buildings, cities, and urban areas provides unprecedented opportunities to better understand and optimize transportation, energy and water networks, and how human behavior affects them (and is, in turn, affected by them). However, historically due to poor-quality data, limitations in algorithms, and computational bottlenecks, modeling urban-scale occupant behavior and its interactions with energy and transportation demand has proven to be quite challenging. Therefore, progress in developing data-driven techniques, which can work with enormous amounts of data that is increasingly available today, is needed to unlock its full potential.

To realize this potential, BALANCES focuses on innovative data-driven methodologies for modeling and optimizing buildings and cities.

The workshop aims to foster discussions on:
1. Big data modeling paradigms that could be applicable in building and urban science,
2. Data collection infrastructure requirements for these modeling paradigms,
3. Challenges faced by current modeling approaches, and
4. Future research directions to fully utilize building and urban big data.

BALANCES'26 will be held in conjunction with ACM BuildSys 2026 and the ACM e-Energy within ACM Sustainability Week.