FAU Faculty Receives Fellowship

Emmanouil Vermisso, recently received a Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program (GDFP). To support his doctoral research at the University of Patras, called, “Generative Design Processes in Architectural Education.”

The project was inspired by the recent integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning within various disciplines (Susskind and Susskind, 2015) and expands on Vermisso’s earlier interest in the ability of bottom-up creativity with minimal human agency, observed in the emergent behavior of complex systems (Emergent Form, from 2015 to 2019), as well as recent work on machine learning in architecture with Daniel Bolojan, an assistant professor in FAU’s School of Architecture, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters (Gaudí’s Hallucinations, in 2019).

The GDFP fellowship supports Greek academics who are based in the United States and are invited by Greek universities as visiting fellows. It is sponsored by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation and the Fulbright Foundation, Greece and administered by the Institute of International Education.

The funding will help develop a generative design process combining intuitive and machine-informed decision making and contemplate its potential for architectural education. This will allow the assessment of design workflows which leverage current advancements in AI to augment the creative thinking process and gain insight into cognition.

From an applied perspective, this research is important because there is a very limited body of work which connects AI to architectural design. The domain of architecture has not yet capitalized on machine learning algorithms because they demonstrate limitations and design tasks which often require the most creative kind of thinking.

As this kind of work is “expensive” in both time and resources (training neural networks requires state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) and days or weeks of training) the funding will facilitate access to necessary hardware and fast GPU outside the University of Patras school of Architecture, which has no such equipment. From a theoretical point of view, the work can implicitly address Alan Turing’s early interest in assessing machines’ ability to think, which was rerouted to more practical applications like software development for automation, according to Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive science and comparative literature (Somers, 2013). Applications of computational creativity is an important topic which has yet to influence the architectural domain, potentially altering design methods and overall curricula, transforming designers’ required skill set in the longer term.

Vermisso’s current research is around the new-found potential of AI to better understand the cognitive process in design. For more information about Vermisso’s work, visit here.

– Story courtesy of Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters