This section introduces what international researchers and graduate students at UTokyo-IIS think and feel through their research, extracurricular activities, and daily life.

As an architect, the influence of Japanese architecture, both ancient and contemporary, cannot be escaped. But my admiration for Japan began way before architecture school and continues to this day.

Overall, I have always admired Tokyo, the complexity, the efficiency, the character, as well as the Japanese language, which shares this fine balance of complexity, simplicity and hybridization.

So I decided to study Japanese and move to Tokyo. With a fundamental passion for design, a fascination for cities, and an unsettling curiosity for technology, I learned from my professional experience in the Portuguese government and developed a research plan integrating design, law and computer science.

The honorable support of the MEXT scholarship opened the door for me to come to Japan. At that point, I was impressed by UTokyo-IIS, an institution where academia and civil society interconnect, public and private interwine, and fine theoretical development allies with relentless practical application. A lively ecosystem where all dualities seemed dynamically appeased.

So it was with great honor and a pinch of disbelief that I had Professor Imai Kotaro trusting my research plan from the get go, eventually allowing me to join the University of Tokyo and develop my research in the frame of the Phd program at Kotaro Imai Lab.

In my PhD thesis titled, ‘3D simulation and geometric assessment of the effects of law and regulations in the urban fabric’, I developed a legal expert system that infers the application of urbanistic and architectural rules to individual parcels in the urban fabric represented as GIS data and produces a visual simulation. This allows us to understand and pinpoint both the effects of individual rules, and the combined effects of regulations on the urban fabric. Specifically, it allowed us to demonstrate the legal origin of the phenomenon of parcel amalgamation that has been altering the character of central areas in Tokyo and to gauge its varying intensity, enabling us to test and propose legal alternatives.

Now, still within the Interspace Research Center, and with the incredible opportunity to work in Professor Toyoda Keisuke’s Common Ground Research Lab, my research took a turn back to the human scale and the direct relationship between the human body and space, this time mediated by sensor data, delving into how AI can make sense out of it and add to an improved, extended spatial experience.

I look forward to continuing to develop my work within this multicultural, cross-disciplinary, interspatial ecosystem.

Image description: “self-uploading to the ‘Common Ground’. Experimentation with sensor data capture and processing, a fundamental step for the connection between physical and virtual worlds.

Text, Image: Project Researcher Hermenegildo Solheiro
Department of Human and Social Systems, UTokyo-IIS
Keisuke Toyoda Lab.