Zhang Zhiang: Seven years of hard work  to help achieve the goal of emissions peak and carbon neutrality

Dr Zhiang Zhang, a graduate of Architectural Environment Engineering programme in 2014, has been working in both industry and academia in the field of intelligent control for more than seven years. He is now working in the UNNC Department of Architecture and Built Environment as an Assistant Professor and Course Director. We would like to share his working experience and career development in this article.

After graduating in 2014, he entered Carnegie Mellon University in the United States to study for his master's degree in building performance and diagnosis, and continued his studies in this field after graduation. During his doctoral study, he was a visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore and carried out research on smart architecture in the United States and Singapore at the same time. After getting his doctorate degree, he returned to China and joined Alibaba Cloud as an algorithm engineer.

Dr Zhang told us that while his major is an older field of engineering, it has developed new branches in the era of big data and AI. He is happy with his chosen career direction of intelligent control due to the subfield being a perfect combination of AI and conventional HVAC (Heating Ventilation Air Conditioning) engineering, which is seeing an increase in demand from clients.

At Alibaba Cloud, Dr Zhang's work was to develop intelligent control algorithms for industrial processes. When people hear about of the position of Algorithm Engineer, they often think of programmers coding in the office. However, Dr Zhang mostly runs among equipment rooms and factories. He said that he believes field experience is important for any engineer. During his work at Alibaba Cloud, he spent more than half of his time traveling around different project sites and communicating with a variety of customers. Although it was tiring, he was grateful for this experience. As an engineer, his hard working spirit has made him feel a sense of achievement, being able to see his ideas becoming a product and benefiting more clients.

During his seven years working in this field, Dr Zhang developed a new control strategy through an innovative deep reinforcement learning algorithm and has applied it to an old radiating heating system installed 20 years ago, leading to an improvement in energy efficiency of 20%. His scientific research ideas have resulted in a prototype. The related paper was published in Energy and Buildings and received the Outstanding Paper Award in the 7th International Conference on Building Physics. This research outcome is set to be commercialised and deployed in a larger industrial refrigeration system.

Dr Zhang recalled that the ability to research independently and critical thinking skills were the most important skills he learned in the UNNC and benefited him most in his career. "Many assignments require students to find information and analyse independently and we need to find the answer ourselves and make our own judgment. These are the same in work. My customers will never tell me what to do and expect me to tell them the answer, so I must make judgments based on my knowledge, experience, and information. "