Dr. Stephen Law

Dr Stephen Law is a Research Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and Senior Research Fellow at the University College London Bartlett School of Architecture. His current research interests sit at the intersection of data science, GeoAI and urban design analytics.. He completed a PhD in UCL studying the economic value of spatial networks in the housing market a master degree in Urban Design and a Bachelor degree in Economics. He has over 10 years of international consultancy experience (eg. Space Syntax Limited and Aecom) with emphasis on pedestrian movement modelling and simulation, geo-spatial analytics, network science and urban design.

Stephens research focuses on: “What is the intangible value of urban design?” Recent advances in citizen science and geo-data computation, present the possibility of analysing the collective perception of urban design with large volumes of crowd-source data and machine learning techniques. His research tackles this research challenging by discovering novel salient built environment factors using both network science methods from space syntax and methods in computer vision. He then uses machine learning methods to infer the implicit value from the design of the built environment. The vision and the ambition of the research is to build an open source toolkit known as the “Urban-Value Toolkit” where future urban design projects can be evaluated against and also be used to generatively improve existing design.