Design as a process in the large combines activities ranging from those that build on intuition to those that are highly mechanical. Automation has traditionally taken an important role in alleviation some of the more menial operations. Artificial Intelligence holds great promise in also assisting the user with their more creative operations or even taking over some of those entirely. Instead of focusing on an exclusively computational design process, this presentation takes the perspective of human activities in design in an attempt to highlight symbiotic opportunity for combined human/artificial intelligence. A Create, Organize, Refine, Evaluate (CORE) framework is utilized to identify a range of design activities and to provide inspiration for symbiotic support by presenting concrete illustrations of the various activities.

Dr. Akshay Rajhans is a Principal Research Scientist in and a founding member of the Advanced Research & Technology Office at MathWorks where his work focuses on identifying and nurturing collaborative research and innovation at the interface between the MathWorks Development organization and academia, industry, and government research labs. His work and expertise includes technical computing for, and model-based design and analysis of intelligent cyber-physical systems (CPS). In his current multi-faceted role, Dr. Rajhans works on increasing the impact of research and innovation along various dimensions. He engages the research community via leadership roles at MathWorks Research Summits and at external research conferences worldwide. He manages a collaborative research alliance program for facilitating bidirectional technology transfer. Via invited talks, panels, and research publications, he provides thought leadership that often includes an industry perspective to academia and an academic and research perspective to industry. He serves on Industry Advisory Boards/Committees for various universities, conferences, and professional organizations, Ph.D. Thesis and Technical Committees, and Editorial Boards. Previously, Dr. Rajhans worked on development and application engineering of electronic control systems for diesel-engine applications at Cummins. As an intern at Bosch Research and Technology Center in Pittsburgh, he developed a model-based approach to non-intrusive load monitoring. Dr. Rajhans has a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a senior member of IEEE and ACM. Dr. Rajhans currently serves on the Advisory Board of the MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium.