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Can numbers describe how a space “feels”? Well, perhaps not. Analyzing the experiential (or “phenomenal”) qualities of spaces and places has long remained a hard problem in design computation. Such qualities are often difficult to capture through quantities or predefined

It was a pleasure to have been invited as one of the keynote speakers at the Cumulus Association’s Spring Conference 2025 at Nantes, and to also speak at the FAISTOS Meet-Up organized by the City Design Lab of L’École de

“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder” It was great pitching my research at the 2025 MIT Research Slam Showcase, and finishing in 2nd place.The competition focuses on research communication, where presenters explain their work to a non-specialist audience

We were recently announced as awardees for the Sidara Urban Research Seed Grant in partnership with the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism! Titled “Beyond Prompts: Analogy-Enhanced Generative AI Tools for Urban Design”, this project with the MIT

As researchers, we must take the first step of always remaining critical of the degree to which our data represents the ‘public’ and being aware of the conscious or unconscious decisions that have gone into generating the datasets our work

The Many Faces of the Metropolis: Unsupervised Clustering Of Urban Environments In Mumbai Based On Visual Features As Captured In City-wide Street-view Imagery The larger visual identity of a city is often a blend of smaller and distinct visual character

The Tourist’s Image of the City: A comparative analysis of the visual features and textual themes of interest across three global metropolises Tourist attractions play a major role in shaping ‘mental images’ of cities. The growing availability of urban big-data

Note: An updated version of this work has been published by the Cognitive Science Society, and can be accessed here. It’s a jungle out there. But at the end of the day, its just a game of numbers.  So here’s

‘Subjectivity’ and the Designer’s Intuition The emotional or ‘affective’ qualities of space have long been referred to as ‘intangible’ and ‘subjective’ aspects that cannot easily be empirically analyzed. Designers thus rely heavily on their own intuitive processes when dealing with