Data-Driven Design for Climate Action

Objective
This research will apply data-driven design to Climate Action by utilizing data from design, manufacturing, and the entire product lifecycle to learn how early-stage decision-making maps to downstream carbon emissions for complex systems.

Background
Artificial Intelligence has transformed the fields of Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. Data-driven methods have the potential also to be a valuable tool in the fight against climate change, but not before such data is ready for computation. If data from product design, manufacturing, consumption, and retirement could be quantitatively represented for computation, then we could learn how to produce and consume more sustainably.

About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Haluk Akay completed his doctoral research at MIT in mechanical engineering. His doctoral thesis developed methods to represent textual design data for computation by extracting structured “what-how” information and evaluating designed systems using AI-based language modelling and design principles.

Haluk’s research interests lie in using design and data-driven methods to address complex climate change and sustainability problems. He also has experience in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) fabrication and product design.

Main supervisor
Francesco Fuso-Nerini, Associate Professor at KTH ITM

Co-supervisor
Iolanda Leite, Associate Professor, Department of Robotics, Perception and Learning at KTH