Aliaga speaks at TEDxPurdueU
02-17-2020
Professor Daniel Aliaga will speak as one of the headliners of TEDxPurdueU, February 22, 2020 at Loeb Playhouse. He is one of eight speakers sharing his knowledge and research under the 2020 TEDxPurdueU theme of “ikigai” - a Japanese concept which translates to “reason for being.” According to ikigai, everyone has a different and unique reason for being. Formally, these reasons are divided into four components: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for.
Aliaga’s talk centers around the concept of urban artificial intelligence. Urbanization is a major problem today as more than 50% of people live in cities. Cities are complex and hard to model, design, and plan for the future. Moreover, modeling the form and function of cities is very complex and done with limited success. Traditionally, modeling urban spaces has been a mostly manual task that consumes significant amounts of resources. With the growing requirements of quantity and quality in urban content, there is an imperative need for alternative solutions that allow for fast, semi-automatic urban modeling, or urban artificial intelligence. This involves new modeling techniques for urban environments as an important complement to traditional modeling software. There is a need to use procedural, image-based, and simulation-based techniques to efficiently create highly detailed three-dimensional urban models for architecture and urban planning.
Aliaga’s research is in computer graphics but overlaps with computer vision and visualization, while also having strong collaborations outside of computer science. His work is focused at urban visual computing and machine learning to provide innovative “what-if” design tools. Thus, enabling worldwide urban stakeholders to automatically integrate, process, analyze, and visualize the complex interdependencies between the urban form, function, and the natural environment. Aliaga joined the Purdue faculty in 2003. His funding support comes from multiple entities (e.g., NSF, IARPA, MTC, Google, Microsoft, Adobe) and his research is in close interaction with both PhD candidates and undergraduate students.
TEDxPurdueU is a student-run organization standing behind TEDx talks and events held at Purdue University. With the mission to stimulate the curious mind, challenge perspectives, and spark discussion, TEDxPurdueU exposes the local community and global audience to “ideas worth spreading.”
Learn more about TEDxPurdueU here.
Tickets are available here.
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Professor Daniel Aliaga, TEDxPurdueU
Title: Urban Artificial Intelligence
Abstract: Urbanization is a major problem today as more than 50% of people live in cities. Cities are complex and hard to model, design, and plan for the future. Moreover, modeling the form and function of cities is very complex and done with limited success. Computer gaming, on the other hand, can do wonderfully complicated things visually and functionally. What is the missing link? We seek to automatically create “programs” from the observations we have of cities and thus create plausible fully functional and detailed models of our cities – thus an Urban Artificial Intelligence. Then, we can perform numerous urban design and planning tasks such as flood mitigation, weather alteration, traffic improvement, and more! Urban AI is critical and will only continue to grow in ability and importance.
Writer: Emily Kinsell, 765-494-0669, emily@purdue.edu, @emilykinsell