2025 was the opening year of my PhD—a year when results began to land and I truly experienced what it means to publish and collaborate as a doctoral researcher. The highlight was passing the Qualifying Examination and becoming a formal PhD Candidate. I am grateful to my supervisor Assis Prof Filip Biljecki and the committee: Assoc Prof Yuan Lai (School of Architecture, Tsinghua University), Assis Prof Yu Qian Ang (School of Design and Environment), and Assoc Prof Rudi Stouffs. My thesis, Unifying and Quantifying Urban Comfort, aims to integrate and quantify the concept of urban comfort using state-of-the-art algorithms and models in the AI era, to support data-driven urban assessment and planning.

Thermal Affordance and Thermal Comfort in Sight

In January, our paper Thermal Comfort in Sight was accepted by Building and Environment, marking the start of the Thermal Affordance concept. We set up a dedicated website, https://thermal-affordance.ual.sg, and hope to develop more work around it. Thermal Affordance is a new framework for understanding thermal comfort from an environmental design perspective, emphasising how the environment itself shapes people’s comfort experience; we explored it through the case of street view and thermal comfort perception. It is encouraging that several studies have since built on this concept, including:

• Visual perception: Visual determinants of outdoor thermal comfort: integrating explainable AI and perceptual assessments (BAE, 2026)
• Visual perception: Street View Image-Based Method for Assessing the Thermal Environment in Urban Historic Districts: A Case Study of Guangzhou’s Arcade Streets (BAE, 2025)
• Neighbourhood scale: Toward healthy neighborhood thermal environments: Interpretation of thermal comfort and rapid identification of hotspot areas using image-based metrics and explainable machine learning (SCS, 2025)
• Network scale: Unravelling the street thermal features network and spatial visual thermal inertia: a study in Hong Kong (SCS, 2025)

Outlook for 2026

We plan to define and extend Thermal Affordance along more dimensions so it becomes a more general, reusable method for urban thermal comfort assessment. Key questions include:

1. How can we characterise thermal affordance more fully, beyond the visual dimension?
2. How can we make it as convenient and portable as LCZ as an environmental assessment standard, applicable to more cities and contexts?
3. How can unified computational frameworks and datasets better serve urban design and decision-making?

Conferences and academic exchange

In June I attended CUPUM 2025 at UCL East in London and gave a conference presentation on Urban Comfort Assessment, also chairing a session. The conference introduced me to many new colleagues and to the diversity of urban research. For PhD students, taking part in such forums, sharing work, and exploring collaboration and career options feels especially important.

From June to July I focused on preparing for the NUS Qualifying Examination (written and oral) with my supervisor Filip. I passed the oral examination on 15 July and formally became a PhD Candidate. Thanks to the committee and lab members, and especially to Filip for his support throughout.

In December I took part in the 2nd NUS–Tsinghua Workshop, with in-depth exchange among PhD peers from Tsinghua and NUS. The workshop was organised by Prof Zhang Ye (Tsinghua) and Lau Siu Kit (NUS); I met many doctoral researchers in the same field and look forward to more collaboration.

On 26 January 2026 I attended the AAAI AI for Urban Planning Workshop and connected with more PhD students from Seoul National University, Tsinghua University, Queensland University of Technology, and elsewhere.

In short

2025 was a year of both reflection and output; I am steadily finding my place in academia and in published work. In 2026 I aim to take a more active part in academic life and to contribute further to the field.