土木一 Patricia Naomi N. G. 邱婉婷
On Friday, 3rd May 2024, an AI Center Visit was held at National Taiwan University. It was located on the 13th floor of the National Center for Earthquake Engineering (NCREE) building. This event was hosted by the Federation of Engineering Institutions of Asia and the Pacific – Youth Talent Development Work Group (FEIAP – YTDWG), Chinese Institute of Engineers – Young Engineers Alliance Committee (CIE – YEAC), Chinese Institute of Engineers – FEIAP 2024 Organizing Committee, and was co-hosted by National Taiwan University – Department of Civil Engineering. It was attended by young engineers and students from civil engineering and also other engineering fields.
The event began with a welcoming speech and introduction of the AI Center by C-S David CHEN, a distinguished professor at National Taiwan University and the Director of NCREE-NTUCE Joint Artificial Intelligence Research Center. He highlighted an important statement at the end of the introduction, which goes, “AI will not replace engineers, but engineers who use AI will replace those who do not.”
The next speaker following that was Dr. Wei-Tze Chang, an Associate Research Fellow & Executive Secretary at NCREE-NTUCE Joint Artificial Intelligence Research Center. In his session, he brought up the topic of a Real-time Disaster Response System with Digital Twins. He explained that the first step to digital transformation for disaster prevention and relief is to collect and update various information to construct a digital twin of the disaster area. A challenge for that is to quickly gather data from massive amounts of text, speech, and images. So, to tackle this, the process is divided into 3 stages with 6 different tasks. These tasks firstly include the early damage assessment and secondly, data analysis and fusion to collect data and highlight disaster points. Then, whole-area damage recognition is needed, especially on buildings, with the help of satellite images to compile and analyze the condition before and after disaster. After that process, a scene model construction and key feature analysis can be conducted by using cloud point and oblique photography. Subsequently, the damages need to be classified since “Taiwan has many old buildings and AI can be used to analyze walls and structures information of the building to recognize the damaged structure components.” explained Wei-Tze. In his presentation, it’s stated that “One building takes 150 secs with AI”, and “manual interpretation takes 3.5 hours.” This therefore shows how beneficial generative AI is in the world of engineering. Finally, the last step he talked about is to push humanitarian care. To sum up his session, Dr. Wei-Tze Chang mentioned, “Disaster is not the end, but another beginning.”
Afterward, Yi-Hsiang Chen, an NTU Research Associate, discusses the topic of AI in Construction Augmentation. He showed that for engineers, AI plays a role in assisting the inspection process on a modern construction site such that they can fill out structural safety inspection forms and others. Besides that, AI is outstanding in enhancing the quality and performance in two specific issues of construction, which are rebar inspection and code compliance of inspection forms. In short, he explained that using AI-traceable databases as queries of inspection forms information is crucial. Furthermore, Combined Structural Retrieval and RAG, GenAI achieves a proof of concept (POC) for code compliance drawings.
Lastly, C-S David Chen continued to talk about Generative AI Trends and Action. “There was the internet. Then mobile. And now, there is GenAI.” showed him in his presentation. David also explained, “With Generative AI (GenAI), you can have any kind or combination of input and obtain any kind of output [which depends on what the algorithm was trained for].” To end the event, C-S David Chen as the director at NCREE-NTUCE Joint Artificial Intelligence Research Center, encouraged students to participate in the GenAI Stars Hackathon competition, whose total prize is up to NT 2,000,000. The registration deadline is 30th June 2024. So, what are you waiting for? Go sign up now! For more GenAI Stars related information, please refer to their official website ( https://genaistars.org.tw/ ).
