José Nuno Beirão
Portuguese, lives in Lisbon. Degree in Architecture, 1989 from Faculty of Architecture, TU Lisbon. Founded the architecture firm Bquadrado architects in 1998 (www.bquadrado.com). Master degree in Urban Design in 2005, at ISCTE-IUL, University Institute of Lisbon, and completed his PhD in Urban Design at TU Delft in 2012.
The theme of his dissertation is the development of design patterns for the establishment of computational platforms for urban design. In his thesis “CItyMaker: Designing for Urban Design Grammars” the acronym CIM stands for City Information Modeling stressing the emphasis of information support in urban design as a basis for the development of the proposed tools. The modelshown in the thesis is a test system within a parametric urban design framework using information provided by Geographic Information Systems.
His current research interests focus on the use of the systems developed during the PhD studies to investigate the following concepts: (1) measuring parameters of urbanity and morphological studies, (2) development of urban design evolutionarysystems, (3) customizable systems for social housing including actions at urban plan level, (4) developing strategies for the Portuguese dispersed territories, (5) design and digital fabrication.
A list of most of his scientific publications can be found at academia.edu and at http://cityinduction.fa.utl.pt/ . Member of City Induction with José Pinto Duarte, Nuno Montenegro and Jorge Gil.
Alongside the scientific activity, José Nuno Beirão has a long path in various artistic fields having already done some painting and drawing exhibitions, and won several awards in the fields of photography and sculpture.
Pirouz Nourian
Born in 1981, Tehran; is PhD researcher and instructor of Design Informatics since August 2010. Pirouz Nourian has an M.Arch (2009) from Tehran University of Art and a BSc in Control Engineering (2005) from K.N.Toosi University of Technology, Tehran. He has practiced architectural design and technical management of design process in Tracture Office [1](2006-2010). He has taught Architectural Design Studios in Tehran University of Art for three semesters. Since September 2010, he has been a lecturer of parametric design in TU Delft, faculty of Architecture. He has taught parametric design and algorithmic design methods to graduate student at TU Delft faculty of Architecture in the following courses: XXL Workshop [2], Hyperbody Graduation Design Studios MSc3 & MSc1, Bucky Lab Design – CAD and Design Informatics Study.
The topic of his PhD is “Configurative Design Methodology: Introducing Computational Design Methods and Techniques for Built Environment Configuration”. His research and specialization areas are Algorithmic Design Methods, Design Methodology, Configurative Aspects of built Environments, NURBS Geometry Representation, Constrained Parametric Design and particularly ‘Visual Programming for Design Process’.
Ahu Sökmenoğlu
Born in Istanbul. Degree in Architecture, 2002 from Faculty of Architecture of ITU. MSc degree in Architectural Design Computing in 2005, at ITU. She practiced architecture in several design firms for 3 years and still practicing independently. She has been teaching undergraduate architectural design studio courses since 2005 and graduate architectural design computing studios since 2009, in ITU. She is a PhD candidate both at Istanbul Technical University (ITU) and TU Delft based on a joint supervision protocol between Architectural Engineering & Technology (TU Delft) and Architectural Design (ITU) programs. She was a guest researcher at TU Delft, chair of Design Informatics between 2007-2008. She has several papers published and presented in several national and international conferences. She was instructor or organizer of several computational design workshops in ITU (in collaboration with AA School London, University of Stuttgart, University of Graz, TU Delft, FH Trier, UN Studio, Buro Happold etc.)
Her PhD is focused on the application of data mining in micro-scale urban feature analysis. This research applies data mining methodologies in urban analysis to explore patterns and relationships of micro-scale data in Beyoglu-Istanbul and proposes a framework integrating data mining analysis results with evolutionary computation to demonstrate how these patterns and relationships can assist in decision-making in urban transformation.
Ceyhun Burak Akgül [guest instructor]
Senior researcher in Vistek-ISRA Vision. Also a part-time lecturer at the EE Dept. in Bogazici University and at the Architectural Design Computing Graduate Program in Istanbul Technical University. He was Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at Philips Research Europe (Video Processing and Analysis Group) -completed November 2009. He made his PhD at Télécom ParisTech Signals-Images and at Boğaziçi University EE/BUSIM -completed November 2007.
During his PhD, he has developed shape description and similarity learning algorithms for content-based 3D object retrieval. He was a postdoc at Bogazici University EE/VAVlab for a short while after his PhD. His BS and MS degrees are both in EE and both from Boğaziçi University (2002 and 2004).
Research Interests
Content-Based Retrieval: multimedia content description, relevance feedback and models, user modeling, intelligent search paradigms.
Machine Learning: similarity learning, statistical ranking, discriminative models, active learning, data mining, collaborative filtering, semi-supervised learning, Bayesian theory and its applications.
Computer Vision: visual content analysis and description, image and shape matching, object recognition, image segmentation.
Tarlabaşı Datascope 