IUCRC Planning Grant University of Houston: Center for Visual Structural Expertise for Resilience (C-ViSER)

IUCRC 规划拨款 休斯顿大学：复原力视觉结构专业知识中心 (C-ViSER)

• 批准号: 2311019
• 负责人: Vedhus Hoskere
• 金额: $ 2万
• 依托单位: University of Houston
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2024
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2024-02-01 至 2025-01-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2311019&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: IUCRC; Planning; Grant; University; Houston

The integration of machine learning innovations into the practice of structural engineering offers opportunities to enhance the safety, resilience, and environmental sustainability of the United States' built environment and support growth of the U.S. economy. The engineering and architecture services sector is critical to the nation, accounting for 2.8% of the U.S. GDP, and bears substantial responsibility for approximately 37% of the global carbon emissions. Structural design and evaluation, pivotal in this sector, serve as the bridge between architectural vision and the realization of construction or maintenance projects. The early stages of design, assessment, and analysis crucially impact a project’s outcome and operational life cycle. Despite this importance, the in-depth exploration of alternative approaches or solutions is typically time and cost-prohibitive, limiting the potential for optimizing project resilience, safety, sustainability, and functionality. Enhancing the productivity, capabilities, and collaborations of structural engineers through artificial intelligence advancements can address these limitations. The envisioned Center for Visual Structural Expertise for Resilience (C-ViSER) will focus on developing foundational machine learning innovations to enhance design and management practices in the built environment. To realize and implement these innovations in practice, the Center will cultivate a diverse workforce skilled in both structural engineering and artificial intelligence. This approach not only fosters scientific advancement but also promotes inclusive development within the structural engineering field and will catalyze wide-reaching benefits for the built environment, economic growth, and societal well-being.This grant supports planning of a new IUCRC (C-ViSER) comprised of two sites – Purdue University (PU), and University of Houston (UH) - that have complementary research strengths. UH brings to the Center expertise in generative AI for structural engineering, computer vision for digital twins, synthetic dataset production, robotics and sensor systems, open-source tool development, damage and fracture modeling, and advanced geosensing. The sites will work collaboratively to plan the creation of adaptable, scalable, and accurate end-to-end ML-powered applications to enable structural engineers in their efforts to reliably and efficiently extract meaningful information from their own digital and visual data that can run on the cloud, commercial laptops, and portable devices. The Center’s research will address the industry need for foundational AI systems for structural engineering designed to transform traditional engineering practices for maximum impact. The Center’s activities will be directly relevant to the numerous companies across the nation providing services related to structural engineering, architecture, design, analysis, forensics, maintenance, management, and construction. The broader impacts of the center are to serve society by developing innovations that will result in safer structures, greater confidence in their continued functionality over their lifetime, with less expense and just the right amount of attention dedicated to maintenance and repair.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

将机器学习创新融入结构工程实践中，为增强美国建筑环境的安全性、弹性和环境可持续性提供了机会，并支持美国经济的增长。工程和建筑服务行业对国家至关重要。占美国 GDP 的 2.8%，承担着全球约 37% 碳排放的重大责任。结构设计和评估在这一领域至关重要，是建筑愿景与建设或维护项目实现之间的桥梁。早期的设计、评估和分析阶段对项目的结果和运营生命周期至关重要，尽管如此重要，但对替代方法或解决方案的深入探索通常需要时间和成本，从而限制了优化项目弹性、安全性和安全性的潜力。通过人工智能的进步提高结构工程师的生产力、能力和协作可以解决这些限制，设想的弹性视觉结构专业知识中心（C-ViSER）将专注于开发基础机器学习。为了在实践中实现和实施这些创新，该中心将培养结构工程和人工智能方面的多元化劳动力，这种方法不仅促进科学进步，而且促进包容性发展。结构工程领域，将为建筑环境、经济增长和社会福祉带来广泛的效益。这笔赠款支持规划一个新的 IUCRC (C-ViSER)，由两个地点组成：普渡大学 (PU) 和休斯敦大学(UH) - 具有互补的研究优势，UH 为该中心带来了结构工程生成人工智能、数字孪生计算机视觉、合成数据集生成、机器人和传感器系统、开源工具开发、损伤和断裂建模等方面的专业知识。这些站点将协同工作，规划创建适应性强、可扩展且准确的端到端机器学习应用程序，使结构工程师能够从自己的数字和视觉数据中可靠、高效地提取有意义的信息。可以运行在该中心的研究将满足行业对结构工程基础人工智能系统的需求，该系统旨在改变传统的工程实践，以产生最大的影响。与结构工程、建筑、设计、分析、取证、维护、管理和施工相关的服务 该中心更广泛的影响是通过开发创新来服务社会，从而使结构更安全，增强人们对其在使用寿命内持续功能的信心。 ，以较少的费用和适量的该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。