B7 - Course reflection - Cristian Almendariz

            This class ended up being completely different from what I expected.  Going from its name Intelligent Buildings, I originally though would a lecture/project-based class in learning different BIM software.  Instead it was a more informative, analytical, and writing intensive class.  Although I would have preferred it to be the other way, I did learn a lot in this class.  Each lecture touched several different but important facts about the evolution of the construction industry and its current state. 

            Overall, the lectures were really informative and interesting.  I think that the guest speakers were the best part of them.  Each guest speaker came from different parts of the industry and had different perspectives the evolution of construction.  For example, before taking this class I did not know that robots and drones were already being used in construction.  Drones are really useful in several tasks of construction for example in site supervision and project control.  Now construction managers, owners, and designers can check the project progress from their home or office.  Additionally, it was really interesting to see what different professionals think about BIM software.  BIM software is definitely revolutionizing the construction industry and it has outstanding future potential.  As of now, most of them have realized that they must keep up with its evolution and learn how to use it.  Bentley’s lecture was the best.  I was amazed with the program capability to merge the architectural with MEP models and its ability for clash detection between elements.  This is a huge step forward in construction because it allows the detection of costly errors before construction.  In order to exploit this technology’s potential, all construction parties should be completely involved and work as a team.  I believe that BIM software training should be part of all engineering, architectural, or construction management undergraduate programs.  Professionals without software knowledge will definitely be in a disadvantage in the future. 

            The Revit project was an excellent introduction to the program.  Before completing the project I did not know how to use Revit.  Fortunately, prof. Mitchell’s video tutorials were really useful and easy to follow.  Moreover, it was an excellent foundation for the term project.  As I mentioned in B5 post, prior taking this class I did not know what databases were.  The lectures, blog post, and database project were an excellent introduction to them.  By completing the database project, I was able to accurately know what databases are and how they work.  Although my database was not too related to AE, I was able to develop a database that could be used in my dads company.  I develop a database to keep track the company’s cars and computer hardware.  This database could be expanded to become more complex and keep track of more assets. 

            The term project was an excellent opportunity to improve my senior design project house. I decided use Revit to develop, modify, and improve the original model of the house.  With little Revit experience, this project was quite challenging at the beginning.  It was really difficult to get used Revit’s toolbar and tools.  I had to watch several youtube tutorials to be able to modify the house roof, floor, walls, and furniture.  While completing the project, I noticed that Revit’s 3D visualization tool is really useful.  It help me a lot to modify and improve the overall house model and choose material finishes.  Overall, this term project was an excellent experience and opportunity to take my senior design house model to the next level.

            Although this class ended up being different from what I expected, it was really useful.  It brought me up to date in construction and its tendencies.  I was able to realize that technology is evolving at a really fast rate and I must keep up with it.  I can definitely conclude that the knowledge gained in this class is an excellent asset for my future architecture master degree program and profession.  I will definitely recommend all civil and architectural engineers to take this class.

Responses,

Mridul,

            

I also think that the guest lectures were one of the best parts about this course.  By having speakers from different sectors of the construction industry, I was able too see the impacts BIM, AI, and robots has had in them.  These technologies are definitely going to take over our industry and we must be ready to accept it.  In order to take full advantage of this technology, all construction parties must be involved and working as a team to develop the BIM models.  Moreover, I believe that architectural, engineering, and construction management undergraduate programs should include training in this technology.  

         

Alexis,

            I respectfully disagree with you that AI, robotics, and 3D printing will not be used in HVAC in the near future.  My dad owns an HVAC company in Ecuador and Asian companies like LG and Samsung are definitely starting to use this technology.  I will like to add that Robots and AI are going to become really useful especially for the installation of these ducts.  I believe that 3D printing and AI can potentially be used for the systems ducts.  Ecuador is a little behind in this industry and ducts are built manually from galvanized steel sheets.  This is really time consuming and labor intensive.  AI and robots can definitely be used in order to easy the process.  I am really looking forward for this technology to be applied in Ecuador. 

     

B7 - Gary Reiff - Course Reflection

This was a very interesting course in my personal opinion.  I have never had a class go into this kind of depth on futuristic technology.  The first thing we discussed in class was artificial intelligence.  While this does not currently have as much of a direct effect on my future profession (structural engineer), I can see it impacting the profession in a major way in the future, especially during the construction phase of structures.  Artificial intelligence could have a positive or negative impact on my profession in the future depending on whose point of view your looking from.  From an owners point of view drones and other forms of artificial intelligence can be beneficial by saving money on laborers, as well as on insurance for the workers or any other type of injuries.  At the same time, artificial intelligence can take jobs away from hard working and innocent people just because owners want to save money and reduce the chance of injury on the job.  I will be very interested to see how this plays out over the next 10-15 years.

Next, in class we went into great detail discussing BIM and databases.  These two topics I believe will have less of an impact on my profession in the future.  While BIM can be very useful for a structural engineering working on buildings, I personally am working more on the transportation side with bridges.  Therefore, I will not be working with BIM very much.  Also, BIM is used more on the architectural side of buildings rather than the structural side.  The same can be said about databases.

So overall, I would say this was a very good course to have taken during my time here at Drexel University.  Not only did I learn an incredible amount about the future of the architectural engineering field, I learned a little about how the field of structural engineering might be effected as well.  I would highly recommend others to consider taking this course in the future.  My only critique is to focus a little less on databases on the future.  I just have trouble seeing myself ever making databases in my field in the future.  While I can't say that is the same for everyone else taking this course, I can personally say that about me.

Comments
1.) Rebecca Lynch's Comment
2.) Laura Worley's Comment

B4 - Group E - Allison Lock

For out term project, Laura Worley and I are planning to examine the present and future of adaptive, dynamic building systems. The term adaptive building generally refers to a system which senses changes in an environment and responds accordingly to benefit the building and its inhabitants. Adaptive systems are a young and rather undeveloped as a technological field. This is primarily due to the necessity if sensors in such a system. Sensors are used to provide real time information but they were not readily affordable until a couple of years ago.

Currently intelligent systems are becoming more common installations. The most typical systems include motion activated lights, air temperature control systems such as nest, and shifting, sun oriented facades. They are being applied across a wide range of construction types from grocery stores to offices and from high tech buildings to private homes. However we believe that the field is still rather undeveloped. With the expectation that the field will continue to grow significantly in the coming years, due to high sensor and computational capabilities, we have chosen to write a research paper that analyzes discusses upcoming applications and the future of adaptive building systems. It is expected that brief analyses of the history of adaptive systems, current uses, and personal predictions may also be included.

Since there will be a heavy focus on technologies that are currently unavailable and other future extensions of the field, it is expected that restricted research and prediction formation may be the most difficult part of constructing such a paper. It was decided that dynamic buildings are a worthwhile topic to study because of the quick and growing implementation of such technologies into common societal use. We expect this trend to continue and wish to examine the how much integration will occur, how it will affect daily life, and overall environmental and societal impacts.

Adaptive, dynamic buildings relate to intelligent buildings because they simplify control processes which would otherwise be labor intensive and detrimental to energy savings. The implications of such tools across general areas would allow for interactions between buildings to increase effective energy use while eliminating unnecessary waste and byproducts.

I commented on Cristian Almendariz’s and Alex Palma’s posts.

Construction Specialities Inc. "Adaptive and Dynamic Buildings – The Future of Environmental Design & Architecture."ArchDaily. ArchDaily, 10 Aug. 2010. Web. 30 Jan. 2016.

Kim, Jieun. "Adaptive Façade Design for the Daylighting Performance in an Office Building: The Investigation of an Opening Design Strategy with Cellular Automata." International Journal of Low-Carbon Technologies. Oxford Journals, 4 Mar. 2013. Web. 30 Jan. 2016.

B4, Group A, Worley

The project that I have chosen to write about with Allison Locke is Dynamic Building and adaptive buildings. Dynamic buildings are buildings in which the façade changes to accomplish some type of goal. Adaptive and Dynamic Buildings are built for a plethora of different reasons. Some are created to be visually appealing whereas others have environmental, cost and occupational aspects. I have always had an interest in adaptive buildings and thought that this would be a great way to be able to learn more about it.

I think that this fits into the intelligent building topic in the sense that they are intelligent buildings and can interact with the environment around them. 

There are many different dynamic buildings that are currently constructed. We will focus on some of these buildings as well as research and the technology that is used within them. We have found many different buildings that we are interested in. One particular building is the ICT cluster of Central Serbia. This building has a façade with sensors that monitor the amount of sunlight on the building. These sensors are also attached to bubble like structures on the exterior of the building. Depending on the amount of sunlight that is hitting that spot, the bubbles inflate and deflate to provide more or less insulation to the building. After researching current dynamic buildings, we will research new innovative technology for dynamic buildings. Phase changing materials are currently being studied for new alternatives to dynamic buildings. Phase changing materials are able to freeze and melt. These materials release thermal energy in the process. This is currently being researched as a method of heating/cooling buildings. There are quite a few other technologies that are currently being researched and utilized such as sensors, and programming.

As the paper progresses, I'm sure that we will find more dynamic buildings and innovative technologies associated with them to write about and discuss.

https://nocloudinthesky.wordpress.com/2014/01/

www.puretemp.com/stories/understanding-pcms

Comments:

http://ae-510-ay15-16.blogspot.com/2016/01/as-i-haveprogressed-through-my.html?showComment=1454178281770#c4049806618483910050

http://ae-510-ay15-16.blogspot.com/2016/01/b4-group-c-sean-coffey.html

B1: Group C - Sean Coffey

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a thing of the present, there are numerous tech companies that have their own AI and actively use their AI’s to perform services for the public or commercial users. So it should not be surprising that Google is continually developing and producing its own form of artificial intelligence. But unlike other tech companies, Google has made a version of it’s artificial intelligence software public so that researchers, students, and companies can modify it for new tasks, upgrade it to make it more efficient and intelligent and learn from it. Google’s decision to crowd source the development of its artificial intelligence has given the company some valuable feedback that it would not have received or been able to develop otherwise. Google did not expressedly require feedback from those that chose use its AI software, but does expect some feedback for enabling the industry with its software. This also shows that AI development is no small task and even a company as big as Google cannot hire all the specialists that exist.

The artificial intelligence technology that Google creates is being worked on and implemented to provide more intelligent, improved services like Google search, voice search, and numerous android applications. The software is constantly tested with the data received from Google users that permit the use of their data to improve Google’s AI software. The AI software learns and optimizes itself based on the data and Google programmers use the data to teach, test and improve the software. The results of this can be seen in how quickly Google’s voice search has improved to understand Google users speaking in different languages and in with different accents and / or dialects. In two years the error rate for voice searches fell from 25% to 8%. [1] Considering the difficulty of this task, that is an amazing improvement driven by data analytics and efficient program architecture.

[1] Gershgorn, Dave. "How Google Aims To Dominate Artificial Intelligence." Popular Science. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2016. < http://www.popsci.com/google-ai >

Robotics

The advance in robotics has come relatively quickly but has not really completely caught up with science fiction and implement in many industries. One of the few industries that heavily relies on robotics is space travel and exploration. There are many probes and rovers that are often too far away from earth to be remotely controlled and have to autonomous to a certain extent. This largely depends on how far away the science vehicle is away from earth. The mars science laboratory rover named Curiosity is only autonomous at navigation and relies on human input to decide whether or not to perform some tests and experiments. [2] On the other hand the New Horizons probe that flew by pluto last year was completely autonomous during its flyby. The reason for this difference is because a round trip communication with the New Horizons probe would take about 9 hours while a similar communication with mars would take 45 minutes. Because of the extreme communication lag, the need for communication between the probe and earth had to be reduced and the nature of how fast the probe would pass pluto also made it imperative to make use of every second by programming the actions of the probe. This autonomy lead to the probe being designed to perform the entire flyby, full system checks and error corrections autonomously. [3] These are huge accomplishments and show how the automation of vehicles, at least in space, can improve the performance of a vehicle and operate in relatively hazardous environments. They prove the validity of developing future autonomous vehicles to perform mining and construction tasks. [4, 5]

[2] "Spacecraft Systems and Components." New Horizons. NASA, n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2016.

< http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-259 >

[3] "NASA'S Mars Curiosity Debuts Autonomous Navigation." NASA'S Mars Curiosity Debuts Autonomous Navigation. NASA, 27 Aug. 2013. Web. 12 Jan. 2016.

< http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-259 >

[4] "Building a Lunar Base with 3D Printing." Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute. NASA, n.d. Web. 12 Jan. 2016.

< http://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/building-a-lunar-base-with-3d-printing/ >

[5] "RMC - About the Competition." NASA’s Robotic Mining Competition. NASA, 17 Apr. 2015. Web. 12 Jan. 2016.

< http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/centers/kennedy/technology/nasarmc/about >

Comments:

Bryan,

I found all three of your articles very interesting and inspiring, but I wonder how long the industry will take to advance to making these processes feasible on an everyday basis. There are many roadblocks, such as capability limitations of the 3D printers that you have mentioned and those that have been mentioned in class, that will need to overcome before that will happen. I also see it being hard for the 3D printed building industry to grow without the development of 3D printers that are reusable. I do not see the industry developing large, unique 3D printers that can only be used for 1 building design. This is approach would be economically infeasible and limit the construction speed. This would favor the use of small 3D printers like those used to make the steel bridge in Amsterdam. Because of their smaller size, the printers could be quickly produced, easily replaced,  more capable of constructing different building designs, and readily collaborate with other printer types to produce composite structures. If this were to happen in the future, it would all but revolutionize how buildings are constructed.

Redus,

I also researched artificial intelligence and found an example of how Google has incorporated artificial intelligence in its applications to the application created by Dulight to assist the blind. Google actually uses artificial intelligence in a lot of its applications to perform tasks like translating text in a picture from one language to another, understanding speech, and recognizing the people in pictures taken and upload to the cloud. There are numerous other examples and it is amazing and somewhat unsettling what can be accomplished with the use of artificial intelligence.

Rebecca Lynch (Group A)-B1

The field of AI is changing the way that we as humans perform daily tasks ranging from how we drive to how we work and collaborate. The interesting thing that I found in the advancement of AI was the change in how these systems are programmed. The article entitled “The End of Work?” discusses the changes that are occurring, and are expected to occur, in the workforce due to the advancements in AI. This integration into the workforce is due to new methods of deep learning where computers are able to teach themselves based on experience through pattern recognition and trial and error. These methods are demonstrated in the article “How to teach machines to see.” In this article, a program was created using these methods that recognized patterns in images to identify and group objects in order to identify the surroundings. This was done by labeling each individual pixel in thousands of photos. After enough photos, the computer is able to group the pixels into the preassigned groups, such as pavement, buildings, and pedestrians, based on the prior experience. This will enable a more accurate determination of a self-driving car’s location and surroundings compared to the current use of GPS and sensors.

The expansion of deep learning methods will allow for the in integration of AI into the workplace through programming computers to perform simple tasks that can be checked and modified by humans. This will free time for professionals to work on the more interesting or difficult tasks. These capabilities are limited, however, in that computers lack human intuition and creativity. They are also task-specific and lack the ability to perform generalized tasks. These limit the uses of AI to programmable, task-oriented jobs. The push towards use of AI in the workplace will change the nature of the job market. While many are worried that it will increase unemployment with the decrease in people needed to run a business, it will also open the door to more people in the field of robotics and programming, as well as create new fields. In addition, there will be a greater push for higher education and a continuation of learning after entering the workforce in order to compete with the emerging technologies.

In addition to allowing systems to be programmed through learning, there is also a change in how systems are programmed to interact with people. As Janet Tran discussed in her post, computers are better at performing specific tasks and organizing data from individual inputs into an overall solution. The majority of human-computation systems today are based on this ability of computers, with the computer assigning micro tasks to individuals, then organizing all of the results of these tasks to complete the main objective. However, this method limits the ability of the users to interact and collaborate, which allows people to build off of each other’s ideas, and does not allow the expansion of creativity that occurs when humans work in groups. In new human-computation technologies, the computer acts more as a sharing platform where the work of one individual is sent to the next to be evaluated and revised while the computer continues to integrate each individuals work into the overall goal. This new method allows individuals to build off of each other to expand the potentials of working together from far away with the potential to solve the world’s major problems.

With the new advancements in AI, people are becoming optimistic in their views of how they will live in the future. As Laura Worley discussed, the article entitled “AI will replace smartphones within 5 years, Ericsson survey suggests” demonstrates the populations desire to move away from smartphones to more integrated system of appliances and accessories. These technologies varied from 3D virtual reality around the viewer and holograms to AI doctors and teachers. While these technologies are possible in the future, I agree with Laura that the five –year timeline is unrealistic with some of these applications, such as doctors and teachers. This is mainly because the people surveyed were laypeople who were optimistic in what they want in the future, rather than the expert opinions of the possibilities and timelines.

References:

"AI Will Replace Smartphones Within 5 Years, Ericsson Survey Suggests." Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, 09 Dec. 2015. Web. 11 Jan. 2016. <http://www.kurzweilai.net/ai-will-replace-smartphones-within-5-years-ericsson-survey-suggests>.

"Can Human-machine Superintelligence Solve the World’s Most Dire Problems?" Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, 05 Jan. 2016. Web. 11 Jan. 2016. <http://www.kurzweilai.net/can-human-machine-superintelligence-solve-the-worlds-most-dire-problems>.

"How to Teach Machines to See." Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, 22 Dec. 2015. Web. 11 Jan. 2016. <http:// http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-teach-machines-to-see>.

Shisan, Ji. "The End of Work?" The New York Times. The New York Times, 09 Dec. 2015. Web. 11 Jan. 2016. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/opinion/the-end-of-work.html?ribbon-ad-idx=8&rref=science&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Science&pgtype=article>.

Comments:
Yuanjin Li

Janet Tran