Dr. Ma participated as a panelist in the “Debate: Artificial Intelligence in Building Simulation” session at SimBuild, organized by Dr. Tarek Rakha. The debate brought together leading voices in the building performance simulation community, including Dr. Michael Wetter, Dr. Wangda Zuo, and Dr. Alpha Yacob Arsano, to discuss the rapidly evolving role of artificial intelligence in building simulation. The session explored a timely and important question for the field: Will AI make building performance simulation experts embrace a future of prompting? Participants debated whether prompt engineering will become an essential skill for modelers, whether the community should be cautious about the potential loss of fundamental building science principles in large language model workflows, and how AI may help make simulation faster, more efficient, and more accessible to practitioners and researchers.
