gsapp_cdp

How can AI-generated images better reflect the diverse realities of our world?....

'VisionRAG', developed by Judd Smith @ and Virginia Zangs , tackles biases in AI vision models by integrating Google Street View with LLaVA and SDXL-Turbo.

Their tool generates more culturally accurate images, challenging the Westernized defaults of AI datasets. In an era where synthetic media shapes perception, their work is a vital step toward more inclusive and trustworthy AI representations in journalism, design, and beyond.

✨Created during the Hacks/Hackers & Brown Institute for Media Innovation Hackathon at Columbia University, 2024.

This work will be exhibited as part of the Venice Biennale Architettura 2025

📍 Explore the full project in our archive—link in bio!

Tomorrow! A lecture by artist, writer and researcher Lai Yi Ohlsen titled: How tall is the Internet?

What does it mean to measure the Internet? And how can the measurements themselves inform its evolution? Together we will consider how open data, and particularly open Internet measurement data, can both reveal and influence the key networks of decision making through which industry, policy, standards organizations and academic research are inextricably, though sometimes imperceptibly, connected.

Lai Yi Ohlsen is an artist, writer and researcher whose work considers systems and the narratives of their histories. She is the Lead Data Scientist at Measurement Lab, where she studies the evolution of the Internet, and a part-time lecturer at The New School where she teaches Critical Computation, Core Lab: Systems and Statistics & Society. She was a 2019 Artist in Residence at Movement Research, a Year 8 Member of New Inc’s Art + Code Track in partnership with Rhizome and was a Spring 2020 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works. Her work has been shown at Tech Zine Fair, Movement Research’s Fall Festival, New York Art Book Fair, the Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Summit and Our Networks. She loves the Phoenix Suns and the New York Knicks (in that order) and will talk to you about basketball anytime.

Tomorrow! A lecture by NYC-based urbanist-technologist Siqi Zhu, whose work bridges urban development, strategic design, and urban technologies. This lecture is in-person in 600 Avery (Ware Lounge,) and will start at 12pm.

Siqi’s professional work underpins his critical interests: how urban technologies and real estate development shape and are in turn shaped by the political economic regime of the contemporary city; the legibility and governance of emerging cyber-physical technology being deployed in urban space; technology controversies and technology counterfactuals; and evolving demands on the design professions to respond to these issues effectively. He was formerly Director of Planning & Delivery for Sidewalk Labs, where his work imagined how technology transforms the design and implementation of urban streets and public realm. Before Sidewalk, Siqi headed up product design at Envelope, a NYC-based startup that visualizes development opportunities under NYC zoning.

Siqi also teaches at Harvard’s Master of Design Engineering program, where he works with students to design and prototype speculative technologies for societal good. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto and a Masters in Urban Planning from Harvard University GSD, and has led research projects at MIT Senseable City Lab.

Siqi Zhu will be introduced by , and a brief Q&A will follow the lecture. Free and open to the public. Recording will be posted to YouTube slightly after the conclusion of the lecture.

Organized by the M.S. in Computational Design Practices Program.

Tomorrow! A lecture by transdisciplinary designer, public artist, and educator , founder of .studio on how Curry’s practice and research braids cultural and ecological narratives using quantitative data, oral history, and artificial intelligence.

Curry J. Hackett is a transdisciplinary designer, public artist, and educator. His practice, Wayside, synthesizes cultural and ecological narratives to envision meaningful work in the public realm. Noteworthy projects include the Howard Theatre Walk of Fame, the DC High Water Mark project. Hackett began his academic career in 2019 at his alma mater Howard University, and has since taught at Yale University, Carleton University, City College of New York, the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, and is a core member of the anti-racist design justice school Dark Matter U.

Currently, Curry is completing the master’s of architecture in urban design program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 2022, Hackett was named an inaugural Journal of Architectural Education fellow and a finalist for the Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize. In 2023, Hackett won the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Creative Achievement Award for his “Subjective Waters” studio, which explored Black culture and water, and was named a grantee by the Graham Foundation for his ongoing research project, Drylongso, which explores relationships between Blackness, geography, and land.

Organized by the M.S. in Computational Design Practices Program. Lecture free and open to the public, in person at Columbia GSAPP

Join us this Friday, Feb. 10, at 1pm for the virtual Future Present Symposium organized by our program director Professor Laura Kurgan and Assistant director Adam Vosburgh .

The Future Present Symposium explores the use of computation to radicalize spatial practices as well as the boundaries between technology, design, activism, and critical thinking. The event will feature a discussion between and Elaine Gan , followed by a conversation between Sam Lavigne and Farzin Lotfi-Jam . Reposted from