People

Robert Woodbury
Robert Woodbury, Professor
BArch (Carleton); MSc, PhD (Carnegie Mellon)

Robert Woodbury holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Carleton University (Lieutenant Governor’s Silver Medal) and Master of Science and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. He was a faculty member in Architecture and the Engineering Design Research Center at CMU from 1982-1993, at Adelaide University (Australia) from 1993-2001, at the Technical University of British Columbia from 2001-2002 and is now at Simon Fraser University. He was founding Chair of the Graduate Program in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU and of the Canadian Design Research Network. He is a former Olympian in sailing.

Halil Erhan, Assistant Professor
BArch (METU); MSc (Clemson U.); PhD (Carnegie Mellon)

Robert WoodburyHalil Erhan received his BArch degree from Middle East Technical University in Turkey. During his Masters study at Clemson University, he investigated 3D model integration in representing building design and construction information. As a result of this study, he became interested in Design Computation. He pursued this interest in his PhD study at Carnegie Mellon University. The topic of his thesis related to interactive design requirements specification. He is currently an assistant professor of School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. His research interests span from design of complex systems and design cognition to software engineering strategies and education. Particularly, he concentrates on generative aspects of complex systems developed for supporting wide spectrum of design activities and visual analytics of latent dependencies in design information space.

Cheryl Zhenyu Qian, PhD CandidateCheryl Qian
B.Arch and M.A.Sc.

Holding a Bachelor degree in Architecture and a Master degree of Applied Science in Interactive Arts, Cheryl Qian is specifically interested in the cognitive and HCI issues of application design in terms of supporting designers’ intention, creativity and expertise. Her PhD research aims to observe, understand, support and augment user intention and action in parametric design systems. The users she focused on comprise active designers - more specifically, architects and civil engineers. Her objective in the study is to understand the mid-level patterns of work that recur across designers and tasks. Making such patterns explicit may result in improved expert work practices, in better learning material and suggestions for improvements in parametric design interfaces.

Victor Chen
Victor Yingjie Chen, PhD Student
B. En and M.Sc

Victor Chen received a Bachelor of Engineering and a Master of Science in Information Technology. His PhD research combines data mining to compute implicit relations in large data collections with information visualization of neighborhoods in the computed relations. Its objective is to study interactive computer software to support human problem-solving, decision-making and understanding. In this study, his interest in data mining is as a tool to reduce the millions of items in a collection into a graph with neighborhoods of hundreds of related items. Victor’s main hypothesis is that understanding the neighborhoods and the comparisons among them can be greatly aided by interactive graph visualization.

Maryam Mokhtarmaleki
Maryam M. Maleki, Graduate Student
MSc in Architecture

Maryam Maleki holds a Master of Science in Architecture from Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran. She is currently studying Master of Science in School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. In her Master’s thesis, Maryam focuses on designers’ experience with end-user programming in Computer Aided Design (CAD) applications. She aims to make it easier and faster for designers, architects in particular, to write computer programs in order to do certain tasks in their domain. She is also interested in computational geometry and computer programming.

Davis Marques
Davis M. Marques, Research Associate
B. Arch. (SCI-Arc), MSc (SFU)

Roham
Roham (Mehdi) Sheikholeslami, Graduate Student
M.Arch. (SBU), B. Arch. (SBU)

Nahal Salmasi
Nahal H.Salmasi, Graduate Student
BSc in Civil-Structural Engineering

Nahal H.Salmasi holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil –Structural Engineering from Tabriz University. After graduation, she attended Interior Design courses held at Tehran University, Faculty of Fine Arts followed by working as a designer for three years in industry. During of her time in Sydney, Australia, she attended several courses at UTS as well as UNSW, including Java programming courses at The University of New South Wales. Now, she is a Master of Applied Science, graduate student, at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU. Her current research focuses on the sensitivity analysis in parametric modeling. The aim of this study is to propose a method and a set of tools built on this method to increase the designers’ effectiveness in creating-evaluating-modifying variations of design solutions. It will facilitate design space exploration and design alternative generation incorporating the information revealed through sensitivity analysis and through using parametric computational design support systems.

Karine
Karine Kozlova, Graduate Student
Specialist, Information Systems and Technologies

Karine Kozlova holds a degree of Specialist in Information Systems and Technologies from Moscow State Institute of Radio Engineering, Electronics and Automation, Moscow, Russia. Currently she is a PhD student at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. She is interested in discovering new possibilities that could help people communicate with software in a more effective and intuitive way.

David Botta, PhD Candidate

MFA in visual art, U of Calgary, 1989

Photo of David BottaPracticed 3D animation with DigiPen Computer Graphics Inc, and then under the auspices of UBC’s Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC). With Xing Xing Computer Graphics Inc. (also under MAGIC) completed an animated tour of a sub-garden of the famous destroyed Chinese garden Yuan Ming Yuan. Practiced product development, graphical user interface design and interaction design with DNA Multimedia Inc., and then with Recombo Inc., in the area of supporting standards for distance education. Practiced product development and interaction design with CrowdTrust Inc., in the area of social bookmarking and tagging. Practiced qualitative research and analysis in the area of information security management, with UBC’s Laboratory for Education and Research in Secure Systems Engineering.

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About

We are faculty and graduate students in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. We come from many disciplines, many countries and many cultures. What we have in common is intense interest in design and how it is being transformed by computation. We seek to create ideas, interfaces, algorithms and systems to lead change.

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