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I have twice taught technical recitations for 6.034 Artificial Intelligence (Fall 2016/2018), one of the biggest undergraduate classes in Computer Science at MIT, taught by Kimberle Koile, Randall Davis, Robert C. Berwick, and Patrick H. Winston. I have compiled all my teaching notes into nine (9) book-length chapters. They include: Search, Rule Chaining, Support-Vector Machines, Neural Networks, and other paradigms of machine intelligence and learning. These notes are currently distributed internally to students enrolled in 6.034. You may contact me if you want a copy. The notes will soon be available on MIT OpenCourseWare. A lot of work was put into making the technical topics visually appealing. As a result, the notes are illustrated with over 150 original figures, diagrams, and tables.

I co-organized a workshop track at the 2021 Eurographics Workshop on 3D Object Retrieval.

The goal of this track was to investigate measures of 3D shape complexity, their correlations, and the possibility of using complexity measures for content based object retrieval. The results of this workshop are published in the journal Computers & Graphics.

Together with: M. Ferhat Arslan and Sibel Tari from Middle East Technical University and Paul L. Rosin from Cardiff University.

I started an arXiv page that I will be using as my main repository for immediate publishing of research in "preprint" format. Work that relates mathematics and computation to problems coming from areas of design and art are outside of the intended scope of arXiv, but not by much. In fact, one can find very interesting subject classification codes provided by the American Mathematical Society that target research articles broadly related to the intersection of mathematics with areas of design, architecture, and engineering. For research that relates design computation to computer graphics and geometric processing algorithms, the relevant codes are in the ACM Computing Classification System. 

I completed my General Exams, "Logic, History, and Status of the Idea of a Design Space", as part of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Architecture at MIT. The exams are student-driven. My exams were centered around a particular mathematical object called "design space" which underlies all current generative (constructive) approaches to computational design.

After many years, I finally managed to make a trip to the UK again. First I went to Bath to present at the 5th International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC 2018) which was held at the University of Bath. If you haven't visited Bath yet, you should. Bath has been a wellbeing destination since the Roman times (who created Bath as a thermal spa) and is an UNESCO World Heritage Center. After Bath I went to The Open University based at Milton Keynes and met Chris Earl and Iestyn Jowers who recently coauthored a very nice theoretical paper on the visual incompleteness of symbolic calculating. And after Milton Keynes, I went to London to visit my good friends and colleagues from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.

I was part of a design workshop between MIT and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Santiago, Chile) funded by the MIT-Chile MISTI program.

In this workshop we examined how the use of rules affects creativity and the overall design process of interdisciplinary design teams. The goal was to show that explicit awareness of what we do as we design improves both the design process and the end result. The explicit use of rules enhances creativity equally in all disciplines, and enhances interdisciplinary collaboration and participation. 

Workshop Team: MIT Professors Terry Knight and George Stiny, UAI Professor Diego Pinochet, and MIT students Athina Papadopoulou, Maroula Bacharidou, Alexandros Haridis, Dina El-Zanfaly.

Dates: January 23 - 29, 2019 in Santiago, Chile.

The second part of this workshop took place the following year at MIT, in Cambridge.

I am joining the Doctoral (PhD) program in Design & Computation at the MIT Department of Architecture. I have been accepted as a Presidential Fellow which comes with a 5-year tuition and a stipend, and it also includes teaching responsibilities in undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department.

I will be working with Professor George Stiny, focusing mainly on computability theory in design and its connections to current research topics in computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics of shapes, literary criticism, and aesthetics. I have a special interest in Aesthetic Systems that encode explicit rules for the aesthetic evaluation of classes of designs. In the near future, the question of aesthetic value will become increasingly more important especially as attention seems to shift to extracting/learning "meaning" from repositories of design data.

I designed and taught a 3-week course called "Arithmetic with Shapes" for the MIT Educational Studies Program, in the Summer of 2017. The ESP program is for middle/high school students (7th - 12th grade) primarily from the Boston area and greater Massachusetts. The students learned how to sum, subtract, or take the product of shapes (sets of line segments and planes), and how expressions involving these operations can be used to describe or generate designs and visual artworks.

I graduated from MIT with a Masters of Science in Architecture Studies (Design and Computation) and a Masters of Science in Computer Science. The commencement took place on June 9, 2017, and is available through the MIT Admissions website. Tim Cook of Apple delivered the Commencement address; we missed Matt Damon's pirate certificate for one year. Next year, I will begin the PhD in Computation degree working with Professor George Stiny.

In the Spring semester of 2017, I will be teaching a course at the Boston Architectural College called "Research in Design Computation" (DME2100). The course will introduce design computation research and scholarship to B.Arch and M.Arch students.

I gave a talk on shape decompositions and rule continuity and how these two concepts relate to design space formalisms at the Seventh Design Computing and Cognition Conference held at the Northwestern University in Evanston, Chicago. My talk was on June 26, 2016 and it was part of the workshop "Design descriptions: conceptual and computational challenges" chaired by Alison McKay and Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen. 

I participated in a design proposal for NASA's Centennial Challenges: 3D Printed Habitat with the Digital Structures Group of the Department of Architecture at MIT. The challenge was to design a 3D-printed habitat for deep space exploration, particularly on Mars. We were one of the finalists in this challenge and the work was featured on MIT News and exhibited at the World Maker Faire in New York City (26-27 September, 2015).