Muhammad Usman

York University · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Lassonde School of Engineering)

This paper investigates the interactions between sidewalk delivery robots and pedestrians in urban settings to evaluate pedestrian safety and robot efficiency in shared spaces. We developed a 3D digital twin environment model that allows realistic simulation of robot-human and robot-cityscape interactions, adopting the Pedestrian Aware Model (PAM)...

The Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) continued to strike as a highly infectious and fast-spreading disease in 2020 and 2021. As the research community took active responses to this pandemic, we saw the release of many COVID-19-related datasets and visualization dashboards. However, existing resources are insufficient to support multi-scale and multi-...

Floorplans often require considering numerous factors, from the layout size to cost, numeric attributes such as room sizes, and other intrinsic properties such as connectivity between visible regions. Representing these complex factors is challenging, but doing so in a representative and efficient way can enable new modes of design exploration. Exi...

Floorplans are commonly used to represent the layout of buildings. Research works toward computational techniques that facilitate the design process, such as automated analysis and optimization, often using simple floorplan representations that ignore the space’s semantics and do not consider usage-related analytics. We present a floorplan embeddin...

In this paper, we focus on the modification of policies that can lead to movement patterns and directional guidance of occupants, which are represented as agents in a 3D simulation engine. We demonstrate an optimization method that improves a spatial distancing metric by modifying the navigation graph by introducing a measure of spatial distancing...

In recent years, human trajectory prediction (HTP) has garnered attention in computer vision literature. Although this task has much in common with the longstanding task of crowd simulation, there is little from crowd simulation that has been borrowed, especially in terms of evaluation protocols. The key difference between the two tasks is that HTP...

Introductory surveying engineering courses include several outdoor labs that introduce students to proper use instruments and equipment. Through practice and experiential learning students develop technical skills and learn about surveying techniques and methods. In addition, through review and reflection of their surveys, students are able to rein...

This work addresses a key emerging issue for building resiliency in the digital age and the advent of “smart” environments, specifically the impact of AI on human-building interactions. We present herein a concise summary of the workflows we have developed over time to simulate human-movements and dynamics of human-building interactions. We discuss...

At present, environment designers mostly use their intuition and experience to predictively account for how environments might support dynamic activity. The majority of Computer‐Aided Design tools only provide a static representation of space which potentially ignores the impact that an environment layout produces on its occupants and their movemen...

Floorplans are commonly used to represent the layout of buildings. In computer aided-design (CAD) floorplans are usually represented in the form of hierarchical graph structures. Research works towards computational techniques that facilitate the design process, such as automated analysis and optimization, often use simple floorplan representations...

This paper describes using human creativity within a gamified collaborative design framework to address the complexity of predictive environment design. This framework is predicated on gamifying crowd objectives and presenting environment design problems as puzzles. A usability study reveals that the framework is considered usable for the task. Par...

Crowd simulations provide a practical approach to evaluate building design alternatives with respect to human-centric criteria, such as evacuation times and flow in case of emergency scenarios. Coupled with Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools, they support architects’ iterative exploration of design alternatives. However, methods based on man...

Several approaches exist for simulating building properties (e.g. temperature, noise) and human occupancy (e.g. movement, actions) in an isolated fashion, providing limited ability to represent how environmental features affect human behaviour and vice versa. To systematically model building-occupant interactions, several requirements must be met,...

In architectural design, architects explore a vast amount of design options to maximize various performance criteria, while adhering to specific constraints. In an effort to assist architects in such a complex endeavour, we propose IDOME, an interactive system for computer-aided design optimization. Our approach balances automation and control by e...

Simulating groups of virtual humans (crowd simulation) affords the analysis and data-driven design of interactions between buildings and their occupants. For this to be useful in practice however, crowd simulators must be well coupled with modeling tools in a way that allows users to iteratively use simulation feedback to adjust their designs. This...

In recent years, simulation has been used to investigate building-occupant relations while focusing on pedestrian movement, day-today occupancy, and energy use. Most of these efforts employ discrete-time simulation, where building and occupant properties are constantly updated at fixed time steps to reflect building and occupant dynamics. Real-worl...

We present a computational spatial analytics tool for designing environments that better support human-related factors. Our system performs both static and dynamic analyses: the first relates to the building geometry and organization, while the second additionally considers the crowd movement in the space. The results are presented to the designers...

The design of a building requires an architect to balance a wide range of constraints: aesthetic, geometric, usability, lighting, safety, etc. At the same time, there are often a multiplicity of diverse designs that can meet these constraints equally well. Architects must use their skills and artistic vision to explore these rich but highly constra...

Crowd-aware environment design is a complex combinatorial decision process, where small changes in a design may affect crowd flow patterns in unexpected and potentially unintuitive ways. Existing solutions rely on expert intuition, best practices, or automation. To address the dimensionality and complexity of the design process, we propose leveragi...

Floor plan designs and their spatial analysis are typically constrained to blueprints and 2D projections of 3D models. Computing appropriate spatial measures from such representations provides a standard way of quantifying important aspects of the design. We wish to investigate whether a person's perceptual exploration of a space would agree with s...

We present crowd-optimized design of environments (CODE): a "crowd-aware" computational tool for designing environments (e.g., building floor plans). Our system analyses the impact of newly added environment elements (e.g., pillars or doorways) on the resulting crowd flow, using current-generation crowd simulators. The results of the simulation are...

Spatial analysis of floor plans is typically constrained to blueprints. We investigate how a person’s perception of space in different visual modes relates to common computational spatial measures for environment designs. The three spatial measures, grounded in Space-Syntax analysis, are used to capture different aspects of a design such as visibil...

Traffic and pedestrian dynamics communities often use a standard qualitative classification, namely, level of service (LoS), to describe the relationship between the crowd flow and crowd density in an environment. However, this classification has not yet been rigorously studied in the application of synthetic crowds, which are derived using a varie...

Evacuation planning is an important and difficult task in building design. The proposed framework can identify optimal evacuation plans using decision points, which control the ratio of agents that select a particular route at a specific spatial location. The authors optimize these ratios to achieve the best evacuation based on a quantitatively val...

The inclusion of people with disabilities and their circle of stakeholders in the design and deployment of digital assistive technology is increasingly being recognized as important. The Do-It-Yourself Assistive Technology (DIY-AT) approach investigates methodologies and tools to support accessible making practices. In prior work, we successfully u...

We present a preliminary exploration of an architectural optimization process towards a computational tool for designing environments (e.g., building floor plans). Using dynamic crowd simulators we derive the fitness of architectural layouts. The results of the simulation are used to provide feedback to a user in terms of crowd animation, aggregate...

We present a preliminary exploration of synthetic crowds towards computational tools for informing the design of environments (e.g., building floor plans). Feedback and automatic design processes are developed from exploring crowd behaviours and metrics derived from simulations of environments in density stressed scenarios, such as evacuations. Com...

Level of service (LoS) is a standard indicator, widely used in crowd management and urban design, for characterizing the service afforded by environments to crowds of specific densities. However, current LoS indicators are qualitative and rely on expert analysis. Computational approaches for crowd analysis and environment design require robust meas...

The layout of a building, real or virtual, affects the flow patterns of its intended users. It is well established, for example, that the placement of pillars at proper locations can often facilitate pedestrian flow during the evacuation of a building. Such considerations are therefore important for architects, game level developers, and others who...