Claire
Gorman
Hanly



Claire is an investigator and cultivator of intelligent landscapes. Her interests surround the designed integration of sensing technologies with built and natural environments. 

Claire is currently pursuing two Master’s degrees at MIT: an MCP in Environmental Planning, and an MS in Computer Science. Her Bachelor’s degree is in Computer Science and Architecture, from Yale University.


clairego@mit.edu
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Biennale Architettura 2025


Assistant Curator to Dr. Carlo Ratti for the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Selecting and managing the project development of over 200 participations in the world’s largest architecture exhibition in Venice, Italy. This year’s theme is “Intelligens,” advancing the integration of human, natural, and artificial intelligence in visions of building for the future.

curatorial statement

image: The Arsenale building in Venice, where part of the Biennale exhibition is to be installed.
(from Italia.it)


Skills:
Project Management
Exhibition Design
Research Ongoing since Winter 2024


CIBO Technologies


Ongoing contributions to the Computer Vision team at regenerative agriculture startup CIBO Technologies. Projects have included scaling nationwide road data acquisition and rasterization for integration in a cropland prediction workflow, and developing a generative model to synthesize missing Sentinel vegetation index images.

images: screen captures of the USDA’s Crop Data Layer, which is agricultural land use raster data for the entire United States. this data is used as training labels for deep learning to predict crop type.

Skills:
Deep Learning 
Computer Vision
Data Science
Ongoing since Fall 2022

Andrea Chegut Fellowship


Inaugural awardee of MIT’s Andrea Chegut Fellowship, a grant that funds independent research and prototyping projects for women in the School of Architecture and Planning. Project focused on publishing essays and experimental results that illuminate use cases of Large Language Models for environmental planning.

essays in the MIT Public Interest Technologist

image: combination of figures from a scientific paper on millipedes that was found to have been generated with AI in 2023.

Skills:
Writing (public audience)
Experiment design
Research Fall 2023


Art & Agriculture


Art research project focused on the traditions and technologies of agriculture in Palestine. Reimagining the ancient “zeer pot,” which uses a double-layered unglazed wall structure, packed with wet sand between the layers, to create a temperature differential for refrigeration. 

Here implemented for seed starting to conserve water: chia seed polyculture attaches seeds of typical Palestinian crops (molokhia/spinach and kusa/squash) to the water source.

Skills:
Ceramic fabrication
Research
[not actually a green thumb]

For MIT 4.s34 Art, Technology & Agriculture taught by Prof. Nida Sinnokrot Spring 2023


Detecting Arctic Wetlands


Testing alternate pre-trained “backbone” models for image segmentation to determine if performance on an Arctic wetland mapping task is responsive to backbone network architecture. Based on original ArcticNet paper by Jiang et al. (2019).

Skills:
Deep Learning
Computer Vision
Scientific Writing

For MIT 6.8300 Advances in Computer Vision taught by Prof. Bill Freeman Spring 2023


Soil Carbon and the Future of Computing


Essay awarded an Honorable Mention in the inaugural Future of Computing Essay Contest by MIT’s Schwartzman College of Computing. Advocates a greener future for the field of AI, in which Large Language Models are intertwined with carbon models and Earth observation data to foster ease and inclusion in sustainable land management.

essay link

image: Google Satellite image of agricultural land in California

Skills:
Writing (public audience)
Research Winter 2023


Deep Learning on Ice


Implementation of an Attention U-Net for segmentation of glaciers in the Hindu-Kush region of the Himalayas, framed by discussion of image-based methods for documenting glacial extent over time. Based on original glacial segmentation paper by Baraka et al. (2020) and proposal of Attention U-Net by Oktay et al. (2018).

project link

image: Glaciated area of the Hindu Kush Himalayas in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir area of India and Pakistan, with clean-ice glaciers (training labels, from ICIMOD) shown in blue over Google Satellite data (2021).

Skills:
Deep Learning
Computer Vision
Remote Sensing

For MIT 6.S898 Deep Learning taught by Profs. Philip Isola and Stephanie Jegelka

 2020-2022


Favelas 4D


LiDAR-based morphology study of Rocinha, one of the largest favelas in Brazil, conducted at MIT Senseable City Lab. 3D measurements taken and analyzed computationally in order to develop a method for quantifying the uniquely dense and complex built environment of the informal settlement.

project link

images: data visualization of LiDAR with morphology metrics created by Guangyu Du

Skills:
Data Analysis
Literature Review
Scientific Writing




2020-2022


Sed Valorem 


Website for data analysis of race-based property tax disparities in Pittsburgh, PA. Project aligned with studio art exhibition by artist Harrison Kinnane Smith, at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

project link

Skills:
Website building
Writing (public audience)

2021


Porto Design Biennale


Exhibition materials for project exploring patterns of social segregation in the District of Porto before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.Geolocated tweets and anonymous mobile data were used to map out social media engagement in relation to the socioeconomic landscape.

Skills:
Graphic Design
Exhibition Design
Video Editing 2021