SASADA PRIZE
From 2019, the Sasada Prize follows the discontinued Sasada Award (awarded from 2007 until 2016), which was instituted in the memory of Prof. Tsuyoshi Sasada (1941-2005), former Professor of Osaka University, co-founder and Fellow of CAADRIA, a prolific researcher and teacher from whose lab over 200 students have graduated, and better known as “Tee” in the community.
The Sasada Prize carries no monetary award. From 2019, the annual Sasada Prize will be given to an individual whose sustained record of contributions demonstrates or promises significant impact on the field of computer aided design. In keeping with Tee’s spirit, the award recipient will have contributed to the next generation of researchers and academics, to the wider profession and practice in computer aided design and research, and earned recognition in peer community.
Sasada Prize Recipients
2021. Professor António Menezes Leitão
The 2021 Sasada Prize has been awarded to António Menezes Leitão at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal. Antonio is the Scientific Coordinator of the Software Engineering Group at INESC-ID, and Coordinator of the Architecture and Computation Group at Tecnio Lisboa. In making its award, the committee was impressed by the focus of António’s research, the quality of his contributions and, in particular, with the significant number of his research students whom he has supported to attend research conferences widely as they establish themselves in the research community. The committee members can recall the high quality of papers and presentations in these sessions over the years. The committee has heard from a number of these students who consistently report that he is a committed teacher that is highly sought after and that he is a valued mentor. He has established the research group Algorithm Design for Architecture that welcomes participation from students and young researchers that has developed a strong community committed to design and computation research. These are qualities that reflect the memory of our friend Tee Sasada. We are pleased to recognize António Leitão with the award of the 2021 Sasada Prize.
2020. Professor Ellen Yi-Luen Do
Professor Ellen Do Yi-luen is an enthusiastic djembe player who has dedicated her career to researching computational support of creativity. Her early work focussed on sketching with the development of the ‘electronic cocktail napkin’, since then her work continues in the use of digital tools for unstructured drawings and their interpretation, in tangible and embedded interactions and, more recently, computing for health and wellness. Today, she is Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and Director, ATLAS Partnerships & Innovation. She earned her bachelor’s degree from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, a Master of Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and her doctorate in Design Computing from Georgia Institute of Technology. She has served on the faculties of University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Institute of Technology. From 2013 to 2016, she co-directed the Keio-NUS CUTE Center in Singapore, a research unit investigating Connected Ubiquitous Technology for Embodiments.
2019. Professor Ji-Hyun Lee
Ji-Hyun Lee is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Culture Technology in KAIST. She received her Ph.D. in School of Architecture (Computational Design) at Carnegie Mellon University writing a thesis about integrating housing design and case-based reasoning. Since joining the GSCT at KAIST, her research focus narrowed down to three interdisciplinary areas that are not mutually exclusive: (1) calculation for UX + service design, (2) cultural DNA with morphological analysis, and (3) computational creativity. These explorations result in computer-based frameworks or systems contributing to the enhancement of the calculability using algorithmic and/or heuristic computational methods. In other words, her research focus is on ‘computational culture’ as an extension of computational design. She served for the Secretary of Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) from 2008 to 2010. Currently, she is the Director of the Information-Based Design (IBD) Research Group in KAIST. She also serves as an Editor-in-chief of Korea Institute of Design Research Society (KIDRS), a Director of Korean Society of Service Design and Innovation (KSSDI), Korean Society of Design Science (KSDS) and HCI Korea (KHCI). She is a Task Force member of IEEE CIS ISATC: Intelligent Adaptive Fault Tolerant Control, Optimization and Reliability and a member of AIK, KIISS, Society of Computational Design & Engineering and SIG-Design Creativity of the Design Society.
Sasada Award Recipients
The Sasada Award honors the late Prof. Tsuyoshi Sasada (1941-2005), formerly Professor of Osaka University, and co-founder and Fellow of CAADRIA. It is given to someone who has contributed to the next generation of researchers and academics, to the wider profession and practice in computer-aided design and research, and earned recognition in the peer community. The recipient spends a week in residence at Osaka University.
2016. Professor Jin-Yeu Tsou
Prof. Tsou is a Professor of the School of Architecture and the Director of the Center for Housing Innovations, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the Member of Committee of Science & Technology, Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People’s Republic of China; the Chief Advisor for the Low Carbon Green City Implementation of San Shan New Town in Guang Zhou; the Member of Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) Technical Committee, Australia; the Board of Director and Reviewer of the International Society for Computing in Civil and Building Engineering (ISCCBE); the Founding Member and Past President of Computer Aided Architectural Design in Asia (CADDRIA); the Founding member and the Strategic Partnership of the Environmental Design Studies for Public Housing Development with the Hong Kong Housing Authority; and the Member of the United States National CAD Standard Project of the National Institute of Building Sciences.
2014. Professor Mary Lou Maher
Prof. Mary Lou Maher is Professor and Chair, Department of Software and Information Systems; Director, Center for Education Innovation, College of Computing and Informatics, University of North Carolina Charlotte, and the Honorary Professor of Design Computing, Design Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Planning ,The University of Sydney.
Mary Lou’s research interests span a broad area of design and computing, specifically the study and development of novel interaction and communications technology, and models of design and creativity. Her research draws on and contributes to human-computer interaction, intelligent systems, computer-supported collaborative work, design science, and computational creativity. Her current research has a focus on developing social-computational models and new technology as we scale up from creativity enhancing human-computer interaction, through effective collaborative systems, to large-scale and highly motivating collective intelligence and crowdsourcing. Some highlights of her recent research are: developing models of motivation, innovation, and diversity in collective intelligence, designing tangible and immersive interaction environments and evaluating their impact on creative cognition; the design and study of virtual worlds for collaboration and education; and developing computational models of curiosity for extending the functionality of search and motivated reinforcement learning algorithms.
2012. Professor Mark Burry
Prof. Mark Burry is Professor of Innovation (Spatial Information Architecture) and Director of the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL), RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of “Gaudi’ Unseen”, “Sagrada Fami’lia XXI. Gaudi’ ara / ahora / now”, and, with Jane Burry, “The New Mathematics of Architecture”.
2010. Professor Julio Bermudez
2009. Professor Andre Brown
2008. Professor Robert Woodbury
This year’s Sasada Award winner has sustained an exceptional record of excellence as a teacher and a researcher in the field of computer aided design. At universities in Australia, Canada and the United States he has mentored the next generation of researchers in this field; he is internationally recognized for his research and teaching in the field of parametric modeling and generative components; and he has earned the recognition of his peers not just in Canada but throughout the world through his dedication and commitment to community building.
Further, he is also the Scientific Director of the national Design Research Network which is a coalition of academic institutions, government agencies and industrial partners that is addressing critical design issues and particularly advanced design technologies. Through its network of over 100 researchers and close to 1000 graduate students at post-secondary institutions from across the country, the CDRN is investigating issues such as visual analytics, parametric modeling, digital fabrication and computational design. Under his direction the network has held 17 workshops, seminars and conferences with over to 2200 participants, published three books, two conference proceedings, a special issue of Canadian Architect, and a report on Design as an Instrument of Public Policy in Singapore and South Korea among other contributions.