Be part of the transition towards brighter, better urban landscapes

The School of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture of the University of Montréal will provide support for the upcoming edition of the UNESCO Studio, set to take place in New Orleans in May 2025. This contribution will facilitate the organization of the international initiative and help communicate its outcomes. Thanks to this funding, the UNESCO Studio will be able to present the results of its fieldwork on the Mississippi both in New Orleans and Montreal.

Sinem Guney, master’s student in civil engineering and architecture at the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons in Belgium, joins the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape for a three-month internship. Sinem will be working with the team on the Evadia+ project, focusing on the inclusive design and evaluation of public spaces using AI.

Last fall, the ‘Villes Régions Monde’ (VRM) network launched a writing competition to offer three grants to masters and doctoral students affiliated with the network. Sarah Tannir, graduate from the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, was awarded the grant of $3,000 for the completion of her master’s thesis entitled “Breaking Stigma: The Impact of Urban AI on Citizens’ Mental Health.”

Leandry Jieutsa, doctoral student at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, recently published an article on “Fairness and non-discrimination in urban AI” for CIDOB, the research centre in international relations based in Barcelona.

EVADIA is a research project conducted at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape that aims to use AI to respond to citizen needs in urban planning projects.

It’s a wrap for the Datathink workshop in Spain!

Congratulations to Rashid Mushkani, doctoral student at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, who received the prestigious AI scholarship worth $10,000 from the University of Montréal!

Sarah Tannir, graduate from the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, was awarded second prize for her poster on urban AI and mental health at Obvia’s colloquium “La santé dans tous ses états : Explorer les dynamiques numériques et leurs impacts”. Sarah’s poster stood out for its scientific quality, social contribution, and the accessibility of its content.

Hugo Berard, Postdoc at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, co-organized the Workshop on Creativity and Generative AI at NeurIPS 2024, the annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems held in Vancouver this past December.

Frédérique Roy, master’s student at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, has been selected to receive financial support from LOJIQ (Les Offices Jeunesse Internationaux du Québec) to participate in the 13th edition of RightsCon! RightsCon is the largest international conference focused on the intersection of human rights and new technologies, which will take place this year in Taipei, Taiwan, from February 24 to 27, 2025.

Rashid Mushkani, PhD student at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape presented his paper at NeurIPS, the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, which took place in Vancouver last december. His paper “MID-Space: Aligning Diverse Communities’ Needs to Inclusive Public Spaces”, introduced the MID-Space dataset, which aims to align AI-generated urban visualizations with diverse community preferences.

As the semester comes to an end, we would like to wish you happy holidays from the team of the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape!

On November 26th, the School of Public Health at the Université de Montréal, with the collaboration of Espace pour la vie, organized a series of co-creation workshops under UdeM’s initiative “Une seule santé urbaine”. Shin Koseki, director of the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, led one of the workshops entitled “The resilience of ecosystems and riverine communities”.

Eddy Damaris Nono Defo is a master’s student in Environment and Sustainable Development, specializing in planning. Eddy recently joined the UNESCO Chair to conduct his research under the supervision of Prof. Shin Koseki, on AI and mobility in Montreal.

A team of researchers from UdeM’s Faculty of Environmental Design has received the award for Best Paper at the international Scan24 conference. Co-authored by Dr. Toumadher Ammar, Dr. Hugo Bérard, Rashid Mushkani, Sarah Tannir, and Dr. Shin Koseki, the paper presents the results of the “AI EDI Public Space” project, which assesses the qualities of Montreal’s public spaces using responsible and inclusive AI algorithms. The Scan24 conference took place from November 6 to 8 in Tunisia, and gathered worldwide French-speaking researchers to explore new digital tools for the construction and the urban planning domains.