Dr Sean Hanna
The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) is one of the leading forces in the science of cities, generating new knowledge and insights for use in city planning, policy and design and drawing on the latest geospatial methods and ideas in computer-based visualisation and modelling. We are part of The Bartlett: UCL's global faculty of the built environment.
Profile
Biography
Sean Hanna is a Lecturer in Space and Adaptive Architectures at UCL, Director of the Bartlett’s MSc/MRes programs in Adaptive Architecture and Computation, and Academic Director of UCL’s Doctoral Training Center in Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation. He is a member of the Space Group, noted as one of the UK’s highest performing research groups in the field of architecture and the built environment in the 2008 RAE and supported by three consecutive EPSRC platform grants. Prior to academia, his background is in architecture and design practice, in which his development and application of design algorithms includes major projects with architects Foster + Partners and sculptor Antony Gormley.
Sean’s teaching is primarily on the AAC courses, leading the Computational Analysis and Computational Synthesis modules and workshops on parametric modelling and associative design. He also shares the Design as a Knowledge-Based Process module with Sam Griffiths and the MSc AAS. Sean supervises a number of PhD and EngD researchers, as well as dissertation projects from both the MSc AAC and Bartlett Diploma programmes.
Research Summary
Sean’s research is primarily in developing computational methods for dealing with complexity in the built environment, including the comparative modelling of space and its perception by machine, and the use of machine learning and optimisation techniques for the design and fabrication of structures.
Current research projects include: ENFOLDing (http://enfolding.blogs.casa.ucl.ac.uk/), a collaboration between the Bartlett, CEGE, Mathematics, Security and Crime Science, Political Science and Geography, to model the global dynamics of complex systems of trade, migration, conflict and aid; and PROXIES, a project to understand the degree to which publicly available crime data can be used to make predictions about crime at particular locations within a city.
He has over 50 academic publications addressing the fields of spatial modelling, machine intelligence, collaborative creativity, among others, and his work has been featured in the non-academic press, including the Architects’ Journal and The Economist. He has served on the programme committees of more than ten conferences or symposia in his field and on the editorial boards of AI EDAM Journal and the Journal of Engineering Design.
Research outputs
| The Seventh International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE 11): A Report | 2011 | Kameas A,Augusto JC,Hanna S,Lotfi A |
| Representing and reasoning about three-dimensional space | 2011 | HANNA S,Regli W |
| Representing and Reasoning About 3D Space | 2011 | HANNA S,Regli B |
| Pumping vs. iron: Adaptive structures for whole life energy savings | 2011 | Senatore G,Duffour P,Hanna S,Labbe F |
| Proceedings - 2011 7th International Conference on Intelligent Environments, IE 2011: Preface | 2011 | Augusto JC,Kameas A,Callaghan V,Lotfi A,Hanna S,Egerton S |
| Design agents and the need for high-dimensional perception | 2011 | Hanna S |
| Digital tools for creative hinges | 2011 | HANNA S |
| A redefinition of the paradox of choice | 2011 | Piasecki M,Hanna S |
| Adaptive structures for whole-life energy savings | 2011 | Senatore G,Duffour P,Hanna S,Labbé F,Winslow P |
| Simulation and the search for stability in design | 2010 | Hanna S |
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