Understanding the relationship between population and the built environment is essential for addresing socio-spatial inequalities. While researchers have long theorized these dynamics, empirical analyses remain limited. This study develops a scalable, spatially explicit framework to quantify the relationship between population and the built environment at the scale of local census tracts in Czechia. The approach integrates a fine-grained classification of the built environment with a comprehensive set of socio-demographic indicators. The methodology is structured to capture the overall strength and spatial variability of the relationship between the population and the built environment, in order to identify how built form and spatial distribution can reinforce or limit socio-spatial differentiation, using geographically weighted classification models. The results of the study show that population characteristics exhibit linear, spatially conditioned relationships with built form, emphasizing that spatial heterogeneity must be accounted for when assessing these relationships. The analysis of the relationship strength also reveals that some built form types are more socially selectiv
In this paper, we introduce GraphLake, a purpose-built graph compute engine for Lakehouse. GraphLake is built on top of the commercial graph database TigerGraph. It maps Lakehouse tables to vertex and edge types in a labeled property graph and supports graph analytics over Lakehouse tables using GSQL. To minimize startup time, it loads only the graph topology. Furthermore, it introduces a series of techniques to ensure query efficiency over Lakehouse tables, including a graph-aware caching mechanism and two Lakehouse-optimized parallel primitives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GraphLake significantly outperforms PuppyGraph, the current state-of-the-art graph compute engine for Lakehouse, by achieving both lower startup and query time.
Accurate mapping of the built asset information to established data classification systems and taxonomies is crucial for effective asset management, whether for compliance at project handover or ad-hoc data integration scenarios. Due to the complex nature of built asset data, which predominantly comprises technical text elements, this process remains largely manual and reliant on domain expert input. Recent breakthroughs in contextual text representation learning (text embedding), particularly through pre-trained large language models, offer promising approaches that can facilitate the automation of cross-mapping of the built asset data. However, no comprehensive evaluation has yet been conducted to assess these models' ability to effectively represent the complex semantics specific to built asset technical terminology. This study presents a comparative benchmark of state-of-the-art text embedding models to evaluate their effectiveness in aligning built asset information with domain-specific technical concepts. Our proposed datasets are derived from two renowned built asset data classification dictionaries. The results of our benchmarking across six proposed datasets, covering thre
Developers spend roughly one-tenth of their workday writing code, yet most AI tooling targets that fraction. This paper asks what should be built for the rest. We surveyed 860 Microsoft developers to understand where they want AI support, and where they want it to stay out. Using a human-in-the-loop, multi-model council-based thematic analysis, we identify 22 AI systems that developers want built across five task categories. For each, we describe the problem it solves, what makes it hard to build, and the constraints developers place on its behavior. Our findings point to a growing right-shift burden in AI-assisted development: developers wanted systems that embed quality signals earlier in their workflow to keep pace with accelerating code generation, while enforcing explicit authority scoping, provenance, uncertainty signaling, and least-privilege access throughout. This tension reveals a pattern we call "bounded delegation": developers wanted AI to absorb the assembly work surrounding their craft, never the craft itself. That boundary tracks where they locate professional identity, suggesting that the value of AI tooling may lie as much in where and how precisely it stops as in
Built environment auditing refers to the systematic documentation and assessment of urban and rural spaces' physical, social, and environmental characteristics, such as walkability, road conditions, and traffic lights. It is used to collect data for the evaluation of how built environments impact human behavior, health, mobility, and overall urban functionality. Traditionally, built environment audits were conducted using field surveys and manual observations, which were time-consuming and costly. The emerging street view imagery, e.g., Google Street View, has become a widely used data source for conducting built environment audits remotely. Deep learning and computer vision techniques can extract and classify objects from street images to enhance auditing productivity. Before meaningful analysis, the detected objects need to be geospatially mapped for accurate documentation. However, the mapping methods and tools based on street images are underexplored, and there are no universal frameworks or solutions yet, imposing difficulties in auditing the street objects. In this study, we introduced an open source street view mapping framework, providing three pipelines to map and measure:
Built environment, formed of a plethora of patterns of building, streets, and plots, has a profound impact on how cities are perceived and function. While various methods exist to classify urban patterns, they often lack a strong theoretical foundation, are not scalable beyond a local level, or sacrifice detail for broader application. This paper introduces the Hierarchical Morphotope Classification (HiMoC), a novel, theory-driven, and computationally scalable method of classification of built form. HiMoC operationalises the idea of a morphotope - the smallest locality with a distinctive character - using a bespoke regionalisation method SA3 (Spatial Agglomerative Adaptive Aggregation), to delineate contiguous, morphologically distinct localities. These are further organised into a hierarchical taxonomic tree reflecting their dissimilarity based on morphometric profile derived from buildings and streets retrieved from open data, allowing flexible, interpretable classification of built fabric, that can be applied beyond a scale of a single country. The method is tested on a subset of countries of Central Europe, grouping over 90 million building footprints into over 500,000 morphoto
Assessing the accessibility of unfamiliar built environments is critical for people with disabilities. However, manual assessments, performed by users or their personal health professionals, are laborious and unscalable, while automatic machine learning methods often neglect an individual user's unique needs. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) enable novel approaches to this problem, balancing personalization with scalability to enable more adaptive and context-aware assessments of accessibility. We present Accessibility Scout, an LLM-based accessibility scanning system that identifies accessibility concerns from photos of built environments. With use, Accessibility Scout becomes an increasingly capable "accessibility scout", tailoring accessibility scans to an individual's mobility level, preferences, and specific environmental interests through collaborative Human-AI assessments. We present findings from three studies: a formative study with six participants to inform the design of Accessibility Scout, a technical evaluation of 500 images of built environments, and a user study with 10 participants of varying mobility. Results from our technical evaluation and user s
School-escorted trips are a significant contributor to traffic congestion. Existing studies mainly compare road traffic during student pick-up/drop-off hours with off-peak times, often overlooking the fact that school-run traffic congestion is unevenly distributed across areas with different built environment characteristics. We examine the relationship between the built environment and school-run traffic congestion, using Beijing, China, as a case study. First, we use multi-source geospatial data to assess the built environment characteristics around schools across five dimensions: spatial concentration, transportation infrastructure, street topology, spatial richness, and scenescapes. Second, employing a generalized ordered logit model, we analyze how traffic congestion around schools varies during peak hours on school days, regular non-school days, and national college entrance exam days. Lastly, we identify the built environment factors contributing to school-run traffic congestion through multivariable linear regression and Shapley value explanations. Our findings reveal that: (1) School runs significantly exacerbate traffic congestion around schools, reducing the likelihood o
While physical activity is critical to human health, most people do not meet recommended guidelines. More walkable built environments have the potential to increase activity across the population. However, previous studies on the built environment and physical activity have led to mixed findings, possibly due to methodological limitations such as small cohorts, few or single locations, over-reliance on self-reported measures, and cross-sectional designs. Here, we address these limitations by leveraging a large U.S. cohort of smartphone users (N=2,112,288) to evaluate within-person longitudinal behavior changes that occurred over 248,266 days of objectively-measured physical activity across 7,447 relocations among 1,609 U.S. cities. By analyzing the results of this natural experiment, which exposed individuals to differing built environments, we find that increases in walkability are associated with significant increases in physical activity after relocation (and vice versa). These changes hold across subpopulations of different genders, age, and body-mass index (BMI), and are sustained over three months after moving.The added activity observed after moving to a more walkable locati
The built environment provides an excellent setting for interdisciplinary research on the dynamics of microbial communities. The system is simplified compared to many natural settings, and to some extent the entire environment can be manipulated, from architectural design, to materials use, air flow, human traffic, and capacity to disrupt microbial communities through cleaning. Here we provide an overview of the ecology of the microbiome in the built environment. We address niche space and refugia, population and community (metagenomic) dynamics, spatial ecology within a building, including the major microbial transmission mechanisms, as well as evolution. We also address the landscape ecology connecting microbiomes between physically separated buildings. At each stage we pay particular attention to the actual and potential interface between disciplines, such as ecology, epidemiology, materials science, and human social behavior. We end by identifying some opportunities for future interdisciplinary research on the microbiome of the built environment.
The perspectives of affective interaction in built environments are largely overlooked and instead dominated by affective computing approaches that view emotions as "static", computable states to be detected and regulated. To address this limitation, we interviewed architects to explore how biophilic design -- our deep-rooted emotional connection with nature -- could shape affective interaction design in smart buildings. Our findings reveal that natural environments facilitate self-directed emotional experiences through spatial diversity, embodied friction, and porous sensory exchanges. Based on this, we introduce three design principles for discussion at the Affective Interaction workshop: (1) Diversity of Spatial Experiences, (2) Self-Reflection Through Complexity & Friction, and (3) Permeability & Sensory Exchange with the Outside World, while also examining the challenges of integrating these perspectives into built environments.
This systematic literature review paper explores the use of extended reality {(XR)} technology for smart built environments and particularly for smart lighting systems design. Smart lighting is a novel concept that has emerged over a decade now and is being used and tested in commercial and industrial built environments. We used PRISMA methodology to review 270 research papers published from 1968 to 2023. Following a discussion of historical advances and key modeling techniques, a description of lighting simulation in the context of extended reality and smart built environment is given, followed by a discussion of the current trends and challenges.
Scalable general-purpose representations of the built environment are crucial for geospatial artificial intelligence applications. This paper introduces S2Vec, a novel self-supervised framework for learning such geospatial embeddings. S2Vec uses the S2 Geometry library to partition large areas into discrete S2 cells, rasterizes built environment feature vectors within cells as images, and applies masked autoencoding on these rasterized images to encode the feature vectors. This approach yields task-agnostic embeddings that capture local feature characteristics and broader spatial relationships. We evaluate S2Vec on several large-scale geospatial prediction tasks, both random train/test splits (interpolation) and zero-shot geographic adaptation (extrapolation). Our experiments show S2Vec's competitive performance against several baselines on socioeconomic tasks, especially the geographic adaptation variant, with room for improvement on environmental tasks. We also explore combining S2Vec embeddings with image-based embeddings downstream, showing that such multimodal fusion can often improve performance. Our findings highlight how S2Vec can learn effective general-purpose geospatial
Smart Built Environment is an eco-system of `connected' and `smart' Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are embedded in a built environment. Smart lighting is an important category of smart IoT devices that has recently attracted research interest, particularly for residential areas. In this paper, we present an extended reality based smart lighting design testbed that can generate design prototypes based on the functionality of the physical environment. The emphasis is on designing a smart lighting system in a controlled residential environment, with some evaluation of well-being and comfort.
Equitable urban transportation applications require high-fidelity digital representations of the built environment: not just streets and sidewalks, but bike lanes, marked and unmarked crossings, curb ramps and cuts, obstructions, traffic signals, signage, street markings, potholes, and more. Direct inspections and manual annotations are prohibitively expensive at scale. Conventional machine learning methods require substantial annotated training data for adequate performance. In this paper, we consider vision language models as a mechanism for annotating diverse urban features from satellite images, reducing the dependence on human annotation to produce large training sets. While these models have achieved impressive results in describing common objects in images captured from a human perspective, their training sets are less likely to include strong signals for esoteric features in the built environment, and their performance in these settings is therefore unclear. We demonstrate proof-of-concept combining a state-of-the-art vision language model and variants of a prompting strategy that asks the model to consider segmented elements independently of the original image. Experiments
Understanding why travel behavior differs between residents of urban centers and suburbs is key to sustainable urban planning. Especially in light of rapid urban growth, identifying housing locations that minimize travel demand and induced CO2 emissions is crucial to mitigate climate change. While the built environment plays an important role, the precise impact on travel behavior is obfuscated by residential self-selection. To address this issue, we propose a double machine learning approach to obtain unbiased, spatially-explicit estimates of the effect of the built environment on travel-related CO2 emissions for each neighborhood by controlling for residential self-selection. We examine how socio-demographics and travel-related attitudes moderate the effect and how it decomposes across the 5Ds of the built environment. Based on a case study for Berlin and the travel diaries of 32,000 residents, we find that the built environment causes household travel-related CO2 emissions to differ by a factor of almost two between central and suburban neighborhoods in Berlin. To highlight the practical importance for urban climate mitigation, we evaluate current plans for 64,000 new residentia
Buddha statues are a part of human culture, especially of the Asia area, and they have been alongside human civilisation for more than 2,000 years. As history goes by, due to wars, natural disasters, and other reasons, the records that show the built years of Buddha statues went missing, which makes it an immense work for historians to estimate the built years. In this paper, we pursue the idea of building a neural network model that automatically estimates the built years of Buddha statues based only on their face images. Our model uses a loss function that consists of three terms: an MSE loss that provides the basis for built year estimation; a KL divergence-based loss that handles the samples with both an exact built year and a possible range of built years (e.g., dynasty or centuries) estimated by historians; finally a regularisation that utilises both labelled and unlabelled samples based on manifold assumption. By combining those three terms in the training process, we show that our method is able to estimate built years for given images with 37.5 years of a mean absolute error on the test set.
Understanding human behavior in built environments is critical for designing functional, user centered urban spaces. Traditional approaches, such as manual observations, surveys, and simplified simulations, often fail to capture the complexity and dynamics of real world behavior. To address these limitations, we introduce TravelAgent, a novel simulation platform that models pedestrian navigation and activity patterns across diverse indoor and outdoor environments under varying contextual and environmental conditions. TravelAgent leverages generative agents integrated into 3D virtual environments, enabling agents to process multimodal sensory inputs and exhibit human-like decision-making, behavior, and adaptation. Through experiments, including navigation, wayfinding, and free exploration, we analyze data from 100 simulations comprising 1898 agent steps across diverse spatial layouts and agent archetypes, achieving an overall task completion rate of 76%. Using spatial, linguistic, and sentiment analyses, we show how agents perceive, adapt to, or struggle with their surroundings and assigned tasks. Our findings highlight the potential of TravelAgent as a tool for urban design, spatia
We present the algorithm for generating strictly saturated random sequential adsorption packings built of rounded polygons. It can be used to study various properties of such packings built of a wide variety of different shapes and in modelling monolayers obtained during the irreversible adsorption processes of complex molecules. Here, we apply the algorithm to study the densities of packings built of rounded regular polygons. Contrary to packings built of regular polygons, where packing fraction grows with an increasing number of polygon sides, the packing fraction reaches its maximum for packings built of rounded regular triangles. With a growing number of polygon sides and increasing rounding radius, the packing fractions tend to the limit given by a packing built of disks. However, they are still slightly denser, even for the rounded 25-gon, which is the highest-sided regular polygon studied here.
The impact of built environment on the human restorativeness has long been argued; however, the interrelations between neuroscience and the built environment, and the degree to which the built environment contributes to increased human restorativeness has not been completely understood yet. Understanding the interrelations between neuroscience and the built environment is critical as 90% of time in a typical day is spent indoors and architectural features impact the productivity, health and comfort of occupants. The goal of this study is to bring a structured understanding of architecture and neuroscience interactions in designed facilities and quantification of the impact of design on human experience. The authors first built two virtual environments (i.e., restorative and non-restorative) using the architectural designs features related to human restorativeness identified by previous research efforts. Next, user experiments were conducted in the two built virtual environments including 22 people. The subjects were asked to conduct navigational tasks while their bodily responses recorded by body area sensors (e.g., EEG, GSR, and Eye-tracking). The result showed that human response