MIT City Form Lab and Hasso Plattner Institute collaboration
My role: Sidewalk Ballet project lead at MIT
Sidewalk Ballet is a collaborative lab project and public installation. It is not the title of my dissertation. My independent doctoral research is Seeing HAI: Human Activities and Interactions on Sidewalks and Pedestrian Spaces through VLMs.
The collaboration
Sidewalk Ballet examines where social activities occur on city sidewalks and public spaces. The project uses computer vision and vision-language models to identify situations in which people talk, eat, walk together, play, or otherwise participate in a shared activity. These observations can then be mapped across a city and compared with pedestrian movement and the spatial context of each street.
The project is a collaboration between the MIT City Form Lab and the Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems group at the Hasso Plattner Institute. Andres Sevtsuk directs the City Form Lab. At MIT, I lead the Sidewalk Ballet project, with Freya Huying Tan contributing to the project team. Marco Cipriano leads the work at Hasso Plattner Institute with Gerard de Melo as co-principal investigator.
My role
As the MIT project lead, I have worked on the research pipeline for detecting social interactions in street imagery, coordinated the project’s development at MIT, and led the translation of the work into a public installation. Some methods used in this collaboration also appear in my independent doctoral research, including MINGLE, but the dissertation and the lab project remain distinct in scope and authorship.
Venice Architecture Biennale 2025
The City Form Lab exhibit at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale presented Sidewalk Ballet alongside NYC Walks. The installation was configured as a working graduate-student desk, showing the tools, visualizations, and research process behind city-scale analyses of pedestrian movement and social interaction.
The exhibit formed part of The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology, the MIT Department of Architecture exhibition at Palazzo Diedo. It ran from May 10 to November 23, 2025.