Dr John Saffell attended Air Quality Sensors International Conference (ASIC) conference in Los Angeles in May. The University of California Davis manages this regular conference. About 360 people attended and 20 manufacturers and consultants filled the exposition hall.

The focus of the conference was advancing low cost sensors (LCS), reviewing progress in calibration and data quality and data management, and to highlight community science projects.

John’s talk at the conference detailed recent advances and ongoing difficulties with gas, particle and VOC sensors.  He also chaired the session reviewing certification and standards.

The take-home messages included:

• Sensor systems have improved their data quality
• We better understand how low cost sensors drift and how to calibrate
• Indoor air quality (IAQ) has finally become as important as outdoor air quality
• Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), which includes IAQ plus ventilation and thermal comfort, is replacing IAQ as the overreaching requirement by groups such as WELL.
• Data management was the topic of many talks – we are generating massive amounts of data but it is difficult to merge data sets.
• Manufacturers who hide their data behind machine learning or AI walls were not welcomed.