Stacks+Joules is a nonprofit project-based learning program in computer programming and wireless network management. Their specialized curriculum engages young peoples’ creativity to supercharge their strengths as learners and get them on the fast-track to valuable technology skills—regardless of prior experience or training.
According to the Department of Labor Statistics 32% of students who earn a high school diploma are not prepared for college or a career. That’s a vast talent pool of over five million young Americans—including many individuals from low-income families, people of color and recent immigrants in urban areas.
Stacks+Joules believe these workers’ brilliance and enthusiasm is an untapped resource in the race to find technological solutions to the complex social, economic and environmental problems of our time. Their program demonstrates that, with the right approach, every student has an important role to play in our shared future.
Industry involvement is a key part of their platform. Stacks+Joules seeks to provide students with site visits relevant to the curriculum and immediate internship placement upon graduation. If you or your company is having a had time finding qualified candidates for open building controls specialists, we can help.
Dartmouth College caught a nearly invisible OEM controller firmware defect by matching device dropout patterns to a single firmware version.
Hannah Baker, engineer at Willow, walks through how DFW Airport built a CBM program that actually stuck, from training a non-technical QA team to triage thousands of faults, to graduating recurring issues into automated work orders, to tracking a single KPI called 'unsuccessfully actioned' that finally gave leadership visibility into whether closed work orders were actually fixing the problem.
Jose de Castro, CTO of Mapped, shows how one of the world's largest retailers moved restroom operations from schedule-based janitorial rounds to condition-based workflows by combining foot traffic sensors, flush counts, soap levels, and occupancy predictions into AI-summarized work orders that land directly in the existing CMMS, with no new dashboards or tools for technicians to learn.
Brad Dameron from the University of Iowa's Asset Optimization Team and Katie Rossman from Clockworks Analytics walk through how Iowa handles 3,500 faults per day without burying their maintenance shops, showing the exact triage, routing, and closeout workflow they built to turn fault detection into planned work orders that look and feel identical to every other work order in the system.
Tearle Whitson, VP of OT at Metronational and a 26-year facilities veteran, digs into the infrastructure layer that makes or breaks CBM programs—explaining why bad sensor data, uncalibrated instruments, and communication failures will undermine your fault detection before you ever get to triage, and how to build the 'building DNA' foundation that everything else depends on.
Travis Criner, Executive Director of FM Programs at CBRE, makes the case that the hardest part of condition-based maintenance isn't the technology—it's redesigning your maintenance workflows, from validating which PM tasks actually need to exist, to updating CMMS job plans, renegotiating third-party contracts, and deciding what to do with the technician capacity you free up.
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