The Architect's Collaborator: An Intelligent Assistant for Conceptual Design

Dr. Kimberle Koile

April 23, 2004
11 a.m. - 12 noon
Fuller Labs 320

Abstract

In early stages of design, the language used is often very abstract. Engineers might talk about designing a piece of equipment that is "easy to maintain"; architects and their clients use experiential terms such as "private" or "open" to describe spaces. If we are to build programs that help designers during this early-stage design, we must give those programs rich vocabularies and the capability to deal with concepts on the level of such abstractions. The hypothesis put forth in this talk is the following: Computational tools can support conceptual design by providing a mapping of abstract terms to measurable design features and by using that mapping in an informed, exploratory search of a design space. The Architect's Collaborator (TAC), a prototype design support system, illustrates these ideas in the domain of architecture. It supports iterative design refinement, reasoning about how experiential qualities are manifested in physical form. It explores the space of possible designs for solutions satisfying specified abstract goals by employing a strategy I call dependency-directed redesign: It evaluates a design with respect to a set of goals, uses an explanation of the evaluation to guide proposal and refinement of design repair suggestions, then carries out the repair suggestions to create new designs.

In this talk, I will discuss how TAC works and give results from an experiment with a Frank Lloyd Wright Prairie house and from a real-world design example.

Biography

Kimberle Koile is a Lecturer in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT, where she splits her time between teaching AI and doing research in the AIRE (Agent-based Intelligent Reactive Environments) group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Her research interests include AI and design, "intelligent" environments, ubiquitous computing, knowledge-based systems, and human-computer interaction. She is especially interested in how people conceive and use physical space, and how technology can support those conceptions and uses. She and her students are currently working in two areas: supporting conceptual design using abstract terms (the topic of this talk), and working with the Royal Shakespeare Company to investigate the use of technology in creating "intelligent" theatre spaces.

Kimberle Koile received her Ph.D. and S.M. degrees in computer science from MIT. Her undergraduate degree is in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin. In the interim between her Ph.D. and S.M. degrees, she worked in the software industry and as an independent consultant: Immediately before returning to MIT to work on her Ph.D., she was a Senior Computational Scientist at Arris, a start-up pharmaceutical company, and leader of a 10-person project team that developed and integrated data analysis tools with data-generating laboratory equipment for synthesis and assay of compounds. She has also worked as a research scientist in the Knowledge-Based Systems Group at Unisys, where she designed and implemented a system for reasoning qualitatively about gene regulation; and as a research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Group at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN). At BBN, she designed and implemented intelligent systems for communication network performance analysis, protein analysis and design, and pharmaceutical plant design, and a high-performance molecular modeling system.

Host

Dr. David Brown

Refreshments will be served.

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Last modified: Sep 27, 2006, 16:05 EDT