Immanuel Koh

Biography

Immanuel Koh is an Assistant Professor in the Architecture & Sustainable Design (ASD) pillar and Design & Artificial Intelligence (DAI) programme at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He directs Artificial-Architecture  — an interdisciplinary research laboratory that focuses on the design and development of deep learning models for artificial creativity, generative architecture, predictive urbanism and defence intelligence, with funded projects from industry, academia and government. At ASD & DAI, he teaches courses on the history, theory and practice of artificial intelligence for critical thinking (Artificial & Architectural Intelligence in Design), creative design (Creative Machine Learning) and industry application (Spatial Design Studio).

Prior to joining SUTD, he was based at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, doing transdisciplinary research work between the School of Computer Sciences and the Institute of Architecture. His doctoral studies, which was nominated for the EPFL Best Thesis Prize and the Lopez-Loreta Prize, interrogated the formal basis of machine-learnable architecture by formulating a new design theory called Architectural Sampling. He is the author of the book Artificial & Architectural Intelligence in Design (2020) —  a first to reflect on the epistemological implications of AI on architecture, and vice versa.

Since graduating from the Architectural Association (AA) London, Immanuel has taught at the AA, Royal College of Art (London), Tsinghua (Beijing), Strelka (Moscow), Die Angewandte (Vienna), DIA (Bauhaus Dessau), Harvard GSD, UCL Bartlett, GAFA (Guangzhou), HIT (Harbin), Makerspace Academy (Bangalore) and many others. His design work has been exhibited internationally, such as at NeurIPS’ AI & Art Gallery, Venice Architecture Biennale, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Shanghai’s 3D Printing Museum and Taipei’s Tittot Glass Art Museum; and published widely, such as in Architectural Design (AD), Design Computing & Cognition, CAAD Futures and DigitalFUTURES. Immanuel has also practiced as an architect at Zaha Hadid Architects (London), as a programmer at ARUP with Relational Urbanism (London), and as a creative coder at Convergeo (Lausanne) and anOtherArchitect (Berlin). He is the co-founder of the international avant-garde collective Neural Architecture Group (NAG) and co-curator of the global AIArchitects.org.

Education

• Ph.D. — Doctorate in Architecture and Sciences of the City, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.
• M.Arch. — Masters in Architecture & Urbanism, Design Research Lab (DRL), Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture, London, UK.

Chair Professorship

• Hokkien Foundation Career Professor (2021 to present)

Research Interests

• Artificial Design
• Creative AI
• Deep Learning
• Neuroarchitecture
• Digital Design Theory
• Defence Intelligence
• AI Aesthetics
• Blockchain/NFTs/Metaverse

Research Opportunities

• PhD Students
• Visiting Students
• Research Assistants
• Student Interns

Selected Funded Research Projects

• Principal Investigator [PI]. Construction Progress Tracking with Deep Learning on 360° Imagery. Funded by Sunray Woodcraft Construction & AI Singapore.
• Principal Investigator [PI]. 3D Home Assets Reconstruction with Neural Radiance Fields. Funded by Hephaestus Technologies & AI Singapore.
• Principal Investigator [PI]. Creative AI Design Tools: An Intuitive and Generative 3D CAD Autocompletion Tool (In Collaboration with Zaha Hadid Architects). Funded by SUTD-ZJU Thematic Research Grant.
• Principal Investigator [PI]. AI Gastronomic Design: 3D Food Printing for Aesthetic Experience. Funded by SUTD Kickstarter Initiative (SKI).
• Principal Investigator [PI]. Civic District Public Art Bench. Asian Civilisation Museum. Commissioned by Arts House Ltd. Funded by National Arts Council.
• Principal Investigator [PI]. Project VITRUVIUS (AI). Funded by DSO National Laboratories & Temasek Laboratories.
• Principal Investigator [PI]. The Human in Digital: A Research Brief for exploring the intersection of Design x Digital. Funded by DesignSingapore Council.
• Principal Investigator [PI]. AI & Architecture. Funded by Hokkien Foundation.
• Principal Investigator [PI]. Design Synthesis from Spatial Layout with Deep Neural Networks. Funded by SUTD-ZJU Innovation, Design and Entrepreneurship Alliance (IDEA).
• Principal Investigator [PI]. Sketching with Deep Neural Networks: Optimizing Design Ideation. Funded by SUTD-ZJU Innovation, Design and Entrepreneurship Alliance (IDEA).
• Principal Investigator [PI]. Human-AI Interaction. Funded by SUTD Growth Plan (AI).
• Principal Investigator [PI]. Design (by Deep Learning) & Deep Learning (by Design). Funded by SUTD Start Up Research.
• Principal Investigator [PI]. GameSpace: min(COVID-19) & max(Community). Funded by SUTD Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP).
• Principal Investigator [PI]. AI Computing GPU Resource. Supported by National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC).
• Co-Principal Investigator [Co-PI]. Cities of Tomorrow Horizontal 1: Building Proposal Development Evaluation with AI. Funded by Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA).
• Co-Principal Investigator [Co-PI]. From BigD to BigD+: An SUTD community led development of Next‐Gen Design Education. Funded by Pedagogy Leadership Grant.
• Collaborator [CL]. Artificial Design with MIT’s CSAIL. Funded by SUTD-MIT International Design Centre.
• Collaborator [CL]. Relational Urban Models with Relational Urbanism. Funded by ARUP Research, London, UK.
• Collaborator [CL]. Ambient Intelligence Lab. Funded by Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDMI), NUS.

Selected Publications

• Koh, I., 2024. Inverse Photo-Architecture: Architecture as the Sum of Its Text Prompts and Camera Views, in: Kretzer, M. (Ed.), AI and Materiality, Wiley. (Forthcoming).
• Koh, I., 2023. AI Cities, in: Verebes, T. (Eds.). Chinese Cities of Tomorrow: Computing and Prototyping Intelligent Forms of Future Urbanism, Chinese Architecture and Urbanism, ACC Science Publishing (Forthcoming).
• Koh, I., Ashley Chen, 2023. Your Memory Palace in the Metaverse with AI, in, AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) Summer Symposium on AI x Metaverse (Inaugural) – Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-23), Singapore, July 17-18 July 2023. Organised by Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) and Nvidia AI Technology Center (NVAITC).
• Koh, I., 2023. 3D-Diffusion Or 3D-Disfiguration: Neural Sampling Architectural Ways of Saying and Ways of Seeing, in: del Campo, M. (Ed.), Diffusions in Architecture: Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators, Wiley.
• Koh, I., 2023. Architectural and Social ‘Word Forms’ Slippage with Deep Learning, in: Turrin, M., Asut S., Raffie, A., Andriotis, C., Kalogianni, E. (Eds.), Computer-Aided Architectural Design. “Interconnections: Co-computing beyond boundaries,” Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer Nature.
• Koh, I., 2023. AI-Bewitched Architecture of Hansel and Gretel: Food-to-Architecture in 2D & 3D with GANs and Diffusion Models, in: I. Koh, D. Reinhardt, M. Makki, M. Khakhar, N. Bao (Eds.), Human Centric – Proceedings of the 28th CAADRIA Conference – Volume 1, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, 21-23 March 2023, pp. 9-18.
• Koh, I., 2023. Editor’s Foreword, in: I. Koh, D. Reinhardt, M. Makki, M. Khakhar, N. Bao (Eds.), Human Centric – Proceedings of the 28th CAADRIA Conference – Volume 1 & 2, CEPT University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, 21-23 March 2023, p. v.
• Koh, I., 2023. Architectural Sampling: Three Possible Preconditions for Machine Learning Architectural Forms, in: Architectural Intelligence 2, 7. (Inaugural).
• Zhong, X., Koh, I. & Pia, F., 2023. Building-GNN: Exploring a Co-Design Framework for Generating 3D Building Layout Prototypes through GNN and Architect Collaboration, in: Digital Design Reconsidered – Proceedings of the 41st Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe) Conference, Faculty of Architecture, Graz University of Technology, Austria, 20-23 September 2023.
• Koh, I., Hartanto, E., 2023. Neuro-Participatory Urbanism: Sensing Sentiments and Tracking Perceptions with Machine Learning, in Cultures, Communities and Design — AMPS (Architecture Media Politics Society) Proceedings Series 30, University of Calgary, 28-30 June 2022.
• Koh, I., 2022. Palette2Interior Architecture: From Syntactic and Semantic Colour Palettes to Generative Interiors with Deep Learning, in: Critical Appropriations – Proceedings of the 16th Ibero-American Society of Digital Graphics (SIGraDI) 2022 Conference, School of Architecture, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, Lima, Perú, 7-11 Nov 2022.
• Koh, I., 2022. Architectural Plasticity: The Aesthetics of Neural Sampling, in: Architectural Design (Special Issue: Machine Hallucination: Architecture and Artificial Intelligence), 92(3), 86–93.
• Koh, I., 2022. Architectural Plasticity: The Neural Sampling of Forms, in: Challiou, S. (Ed.), Artificial Intelligence and Architecture: From Research to Practice, Birkhauser. 110-117.
• Koh, I., 2022. Voxel Substitutional Sampling: Generative Machine Learning for Architectural Design, in: Gero, J.S. (Ed.), Design Computing and Cognition ’22. Springer International Publishing. 379-398.
• Koh, I., 2022. Associative Synthesis with Deep Neural Networks for Architectural Design, in: Formal Methods in Architecture – Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Formal Methods in Architecture (6FMA), Escola Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, Universidad de Coruña, Spain, 25-27 May 2022.
• Liu, N., Koh, I., 2022. Machine-Reading Places & Spaces: Generative Probabilistic Modelling of Urban Thematic Zones & Contexts, in: J. van Ameijde, N. Gardner, K. H. Hyun, D. Luo, U. Sheth (Eds.), Post Carbon – Proceedings of the 27th CAADRIA Conference, University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney and the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, 9-15 April 2022, pp. 465-474.
• Koh, I., 2022, AI-Urban-Sketching: Deep Learning and Automating Design Perception for Creativity, in: B. Romic, B. Reimer (Eds.), Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture and Technology (Special issue 36: Artificial Creativity), Malmö University, Sweden, pp. 131-145.
• Lee, Z., Wu, J., Koh, I., Sun, L. & Tang, Y., 2021. Image Synthesis from Layout with Locality-Aware Mask Adaptation, in: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 11-17 October 2021.
• Koh, I., 2020. Artificial & Architectural Intelligence in Design, Inform / Reform. Architecture and Sustainable Design, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore.
• Koh, I., 2020. Voxel Synthesis for Architectural Design, in: Gero, J.S. (Ed.), Design Computing and Cognition ’20. Springer International Publishing, pp. 303–322.
• Koh, I., 2020. AI-Urban-Sketching in the Age of COVID-19, in: Artificial Creativity Conference. Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden.
• Koh, I., 2020. The Augmented Museum: A Machinic Experience with Deep Learning, in: Holzer, D., Nakapan, W., Globa, A., Koh, I. (Eds.), RE: Anthropocene, Design in the Age of Humans – Proceedings of the 25th CAADRIA Conference – Volume 2, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, 5-6 August 2020, pp. 639-648.
• Koh, I., 2019. Architectural Sampling: A Formal Basis for Machine-Learnable Architecture. PhD dissertation, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.
• Koh, I., 2019. Discrete Sampling: There is No Object or Field … Just Statistical Digital Patterns. Architectural Design 89, 102–109.
• Koh, I., Huang, J., 2019. Citizen Visual Search Engine: Detection and Curation of Urban Objects, in: Lee, J.-H. (Ed.), Computer-Aided Architectural Design. “Hello, Culture”, Communications in Computer and Information Science. Springer Singapore, pp. 168–182.
• Khokhlov*, M., Koh*, I., Huang, J., 2019. Voxel Synthesis for Generative Design, in: Gero, J.S. (Ed.), Design Computing and Cognition ’18. Springer International Publishing, pp. 227–244. (*both are 1st authors)
• Koh, I., 2019. Machinic Design Inference: from Pokémon to Architecture – A Probabilistic Machine Learning Model for Generative Design using Game Levels Abstractions, in: M. Haeusler, M. A. Schnabel, T. Fukuda (Eds.), Intelligent & Informed – Proceedings of the 24th CAADRIA Conference – Volume 2, Victoria 543 University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, 15-18 April 2019, Pp. 421-430.
• Koh, I., 2018. Inference Design Machine: “Infinite” & “Recombinant” Series, in: Leach, N., Yuan, P.F. (Eds.), Computational Design. Tongji University Press Co., Ltd, Shanghai, pp. 291–296.
• Koh, I., 2018. Learning Design Trends from Social Networks – Data Mining, Analysis & Visualization of Grasshopper® Online User Community, in: T. Fukuda, W. Huang, P. Janssen, K. Crolla, S. Alhadidi (Eds.), Learning, Adapting and Prototyping – Proceedings of the 23rd CAADRIA Conference – Volume 2, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, 17-19 May 2018, pp. 277-286.
• Koh, I., Keel, P., Huang, J., 2017. Decoding Parametric Design Data – Towards a Heterogeneous Design Search Space Remix, in: P. Janssen, P. Loh, A. Raonic, M. A. Schnabel (Eds.), Protocols, Flows, and Glitches – Proceedings of the 22nd CAADRIA Conference, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China, 5-8 April 2017, Pp. 117-126.

Selected Exhibitions

• 2022. Neural Architecture Exhibition, University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
• 2022. 3D-GAN Housing, Jones St Gallery at University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia
• 2022. Eye Rise: Urbanscapes between Man and Machine (Works by Ong Kim Seng & Immanuel Koh), AI with Cultural Medallion Artists, The ArtsHouse, Singapore.
• 2021. CityX, Italian Virtual Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, Italy.
• 2021. AIArchitects.org, Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, Italy.
• 2021. DigitalFUTURES.world, Tongji University, Shanghai.
• 2020. AI Art Gallery, NeurIPS Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design 4.0. Vancouver, Canada

Associations & Affiliations

• Conference Chair, Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) 2024
• Chair & Editor, Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) 2023
• Executive Committee, Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA)
• Editorial & Academic Committee, Architectural Intelligence Journal
• Academic Committee, DigitalFUTURES
• Editorial Committee, Architecture, Media, Politics, Society (AMPS).
• Programme Committee, Design Computing & Cognition (DCC)
• Reviewer, Arab Society for Computer Aided Architectural Design (ASCAAD)
• Reviewer, Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (AIEDAM)
• Reviewer, Design Science Journal
• Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI)
• Member, International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (IAEA)