CLARO: Turning Complexity into Clarity

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Overview

Challenges like climate, housing, health, and neighborhood revitalization are deeply interconnected, and the tools used to reason about them are not. Dashboards, static reports, and siloed studies produce disjointed analysis and contradictory recommendations, and qualitative evidence rarely sits alongside the quantitative. Decision-making also tends to exclude the perspectives most affected by the outcome.

CLARO (Collaborative Lab for Analytics, Reality-modeling, and Observation) is a platform for building interactive simulations that make advanced data modeling and scenario planning usable by policymakers, planners, and communities. In Spanish, claro means clear.

The platform is organized as four layers: data ingestion, modeling, simulation, and visualization. Structured and unstructured sources (text, audio, video) feed a modeling layer built on knowledge graphs, large language models, and retrieval-augmented generation. Above it sit digital twin, GIS, and game-engine simulation, and a visualization layer spanning 2D, 3D, voice, and VR/AR/XR. A conversational interface lets a user pose a question in natural language and receive generated maps, charts, and scenarios.

The design goal is a shared view: the same underlying data, rendered through whichever lens a given stakeholder works in, so that technical expertise is not a precondition for participating in the decision.

CLARO formalizes an intersection the Design Lab has worked in for years, bringing together humanity-centered design, systems and behavioral modeling, and computing power.

Current use case

San Diego affordable housing. CLARO is being applied to help policymakers and developers identify and assess land opportunity, using live data from the California Housing Partnership (CHPD) and SANDAG.

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Funding and External Collaborations

CLARO is a strategic initiative of The Design Lab at UC San Diego, developed in collaboration with the San Diego Supercomputer Center and its Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation Lab (ADIL), which provides data ingestion, storage, and API infrastructure. Nadir Weibel serves as advisor and co-leads the interface and visualization and conversational AI workstreams. NVIDIA platforms, including Omniverse and Video Search and Summarization, are under evaluation for immersive visualization and urban sensing.