The speed with which new technologies hit the market is nothing compared to the speed with which talented researchers find creative ways to use them, train them, even turn them into things we can’t live without. One such researcher is MIT MAD Fellow Alexander Htet Kyaw, a graduate student pursuing dual master’s degrees in architectural studies in computation and in electrical engineering and computer science.

Kyaw takes technologies like artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and robotics, and combines them with gesture, speech, and object recognition to create human-AI workflows that have the potential to interact with our built environment, change how we shop, design complex structures, and make physical things.

One of his latest innovations is Curator AI, for which he and his MIT graduate student partners took first prize — $26,000 in OpenAI products and cash — at the MIT AI Conference’s AI Build: Generative Voice AI Solutions, a weeklong hackathon at MIT with final presentations held last fall in New York City. Working with Kyaw were Richa Gupta (architecture) and Bradley Bunch, Nidhish Sagar, and Michael Won — all from the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

Curator AI is designed to streamline online furniture shopping by providing context-aware product recommendations using AI and AR. The platform uses AR to take the dimensions of a room with locations of windows, doors, and existing furniture. Users can then speak to the software to describe what new furnishings they want, and the system will use a vision-language AI model to search for and display various options that match both the user’s prompts and the room’s visual characteristics.

“Shoppers can choose from the suggested options, visualize products in AR, and use natural language to ask for modifications to the search, making the furniture selection process more intuitive, efficient, and personalized,” Kyaw says. “The problem we’re trying to solve is that most people don’t know where to start when furnishing a room, so we developed Curator AI to provide smart, contextual recommendations based on what your room looks like.” Although Curator AI was developed for furniture shopping, it could be expanded for use in other markets.

Another example of Kyaw’s work is Estimate, a product that he and three other graduate students created during the MIT Sloan Product Tech Conference’s hackathon in March 2024. The focus of that competition was to help small businesses; Kyaw and team decided to base their work on a painting company in Cambridge that employs 10 people. Estimate uses AR and an object-recognition AI technology to take the exact measurements of a room and generate a detailed cost estimate for a renovation and/or paint job. It also leverages generative AI to display images of the room or rooms as they might look like after painting or renovating, and generates an invoice once the project is complete.

The team won that hackathon and $5,000 in cash. Kyaw’s teammates were Guillaume Allegre, May Khine, and Anna Mathy, all of whom graduated from MIT in 2024 with master’s degrees in business analytics.

In April, Kyaw will give a TedX talk at his alma mater, Cornell University, in which he’ll describe Curator AI, Estimate, and other projects that use AI, AR, and robotics to design and build things.

One of these projects is Unlog, for which Kyaw connected AR with gesture recognition to build a software that takes input from the touch of a fingertip on the surface of a material, or even in the air, to map the dimensions of building components. That’s how Unlog — a towering art sculpture made from ash logs that stands on the Cornell campus — came about.