Ruben Kruiper

Heriot-Watt University · School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences

Nature has inspired various ground-breaking technological developments in applications ranging from robotics to aerospace engineering and the manufacturing of medical devices. However, accessing the information captured in scientific biology texts is a time-consuming and hard task that requires domain-specific knowledge. Improving access for outsid...

Computer-Aided Biomimetics (CAB) tools aim to support the integration of relevant biological knowledge into biomimetic problem-solving processes. Specific steps of biomimetic processes that require support include the identification, selection and abstraction of relevant biological analogies. Existing CAB tools usually aim to support these steps by...

The interdisciplinary character of Bio-Inspired Design (BID) has resulted in a plethora of approaches and methods that propose different types of design processes. Although sustainable, creative and complex system design processes are not mutually incompatible they do focus on different aspects of design. This research defines areas of focus for th...

Regulations and test criteria for building products are captured in hundreds of interrelated documents. It can be daunting to figure out which of these documents contain information that is relevant to your building project or product. In this paper, we describe work on an Information Retrieval (IR) system that aims to search through the contents o...

Wouldn’t it be great if we could automatically check whether a Building Information Model (BIM) complies with all the relevant building regulations? Despite a plethora of motivations and a long history of research, the Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) problem is far from solved. We argue that a general solution to ACC may not be feasible based o...

Compliance Checking (CC) would be a lot easier if we could automatically map between (1) terms that occur in building regulations and (2) elements of buildings and building products. However, the terminology used in the regulations is vastly different from the terminology found in Building Information Models (BIM). We are therefore forced to someho...

Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems aim to semantically parse building regulations to a set of rules. However, semantic parsing is known to be hard and requires large amounts of training data. The complexity of creating such training data has led to research that focuses on small sub-tasks, such as shallow parsing or the extraction of a lim...

Engineering inspired by biology – recently termed biom* – has led to various groundbreaking technological developments. Example areas of application include aerospace engineering and robotics. However, biom* is not always successful and only sporadically applied in industry. The reason is that a systematic approach to biom* remains at large, despit...

Nature has inspired various groundbreaking technological developments in applications ranging from robotics to aerospace engineering and the manufacturing of medical devices. However, accessing the information captured in scientific biology texts is a time-consuming and hard task that requires domain-specific knowledge. Improving access for outside...

Information Extraction (IE) from scientific texts can be used to guide readers to the central information in scientific documents. But narrow IE systems extract only a fraction of the information captured, and Open IE systems do not perform well on the long and complex sentences encountered in scientific texts. In this work we combine the output of...

This paper investigates how and whether existing or current design tools, assist and support designers and engineers in the early-phases of ideation and conceptualization stages of design and engineering processes. The research explores how fluidly and/or congruously technology affords cognitive, emotive, gesture-based shape-and-form transformation...

When solving engineering problems through biomimetic design, a lack of knowledge of biology often impedes the translation of biological ideas into engineering principles. Specific challenges are the identification, selection and abstraction of relevant biological information. The use of engineering terminology to search for relevant biological info...

Keep IT real, create, build, and develop design tools that support designers during the early phases of design processing. This paper investigates how, and whether, current technology can afford real-time interaction and affective computing in a HDT(E) design tool that integrates and blends realities through physical and virtual interaction. Intera...

Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools do not really support ideation, despite the importance of ideation to any design process. Rawshaping Technology (RST) proposes heuristic shape ideation to support creativity, intuition, tacit knowing and reflection-in-action. During this research project I investigated the possibility of developing a novel approach...