Rohit’s interests lie in data-driven lines of inquiry into the subjective experiential qualities of urban environments. His recent work has focused on the creation of design assistance and evaluation tools that help designers and planners to systematically engage with such complex qualities of the public realm. He also takes a keen interest in the medieval Islamic Architecture in North India.
Talk at Autodesk Research
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
Keynote at CUMULUS 2025, Nantes, France
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
Talk: MIT 3 Minute Thesis
“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
Research Grant: Generative AI Tools for Urban Design
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
Interview with the MIT Public Interest Technologist
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
Talk: Qila-Raipithora and the Politics of Delhi’s Heritage(s)
I recently spoke at the 2024 Correa Symposium “The Design Politics of Inhabited World Heritage Sites“, supported by the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism Charles Correa Fund. The talk, “Fact, Fiction and Fantasy: Qila-Raipithora and the Politics
The Many Faces of the Metropolis
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
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
It’s a jungle out there! A mathematical guide to a comfortable metro ride
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
‘Feeling Spaces’: Machine Learning for Predictive Emotion Analysis
‘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
