Mapping Out a Deep Digital Future
Attendees at ENR's FutureTech East conference in New York City at the start of October explored the industry's future and looked inside a mid-size construction firm's innovation culture, including an invention that some are calling the Google Maps of construction.
Rogers-O'Brien Construction is testing the software created by Joe Williams, director of technology, and Todd Wynne, construction technology manager, on projects. The two realized that by stitching plans together edge to edge and including contextual data, such as layering multiple trades on the map, the system they call Project Atlas can bring an entire multibuilding campus project to life on an iPad in a Google Maps-like fashion. As the user zooms in, the view progressively delivers greater detail, down to dimensions and fixture data.
Williams said Project Atlas now has been spun off as a separate entity, with Williams and Wynne as majority owners. Rogers-O'Brien is fully supportive and holds a small stake, he said, but the tool is not yet market-ready.
Project Atlas has been in rapid development for a year. New features debuted at FutureTech, including real-time integration with an indoor positioning beacon system, from Red Point Positioning, and a 360º room view. Wynne admitted that maintaining a current plan set in a Project Atlas view is a challenge, though, and still has to be done by "brute force."
One of the inventors' goals is to automate the 2D plan-stitching-and-assembly process. The most efficient way, they say, would be to generate directly from a 3D BIM, but 2D plan sheets are the form still required for many projects.
Human-Computer Partners
Brad Hardin, chief technology officer for Black & Veatch, spoke earlier that day on machine learning. He said continuing improvement in computer processing speed and the plunging cost of storage has brought us to the point where technology is no longer a limiting factor in developing systems that can independently research engineering problems and offer optimized solutions. Black & Veatch is a strategic partner with the team developing business applications for IBM's Watson cognitive computing system. Hardin says he doesn't like to apply the term "artificial intelligence" to cognitive computing because "intelligence is intelligence. When it is captured by a machine, it is still our intelligence."
Hardin proposed that humans and computers should partner, and each do what they do best: Cognitive computers can observe, interpret, evaluate and offer optimized alternatives, and humans can spend less time researching and calculating and more time addressing questions with creativity and imagination.
Hardin said the human brain can store about 10 to 100 terabytes of data, based on a calculation of its roughly 100 billion neurons with about 1,000 connections. "If you extrapolate that to data points, it's about 1 trillion data points, or about 100 terabytes of data. We are pretty high-end on the storage side."
However, humans are weaker on the processor side. "Our processors work on more of a kilohertz speed rather than megahertz," Hardin said. "That means there is significantly more processing time than a computer." An advanced computer such as Watson can read a million books per second, but humans are good at creative thought, seeing patterns, planning logic and pulling together abstract concepts.
A change is unfolding in how people interact with computers. We still cling to peripheral input-output devices and click, drag and print 2D information, but soon we mostly will talk with computers to interact and command. Hardin said that will lead to "better outputs and inputs, providing more data-rich information than in the past."
Hardin gave the example of an engineer verbally asking a computer to find the optimal pump for an installation in a powerplant. The computer researches and places a suggested pump in the design almost instantly. Yet Hardin does not see this as a threat to engineering and construction jobs. Rather, he sees it as "the next step in how we are going to become much more efficient as an industry."
The coming tools will enhance collaboration and do a better job of "analyzing our historical data so that we don't start each job from zero," added Anthony Colonna, Skanska USA Building's senior vice president of innovative construction solutions. A shift from rules-based software to systems that learn through observation, along with immersive technologies and handheld devices that let users interface fluidly with computers, is driving improvements, he added.
Colonna gave the example of bringing efficiency to today's jobsite, which he described as "organized chaos, at best," by tracking people and assets for greater visibility. "We will be able to make quick and dynamic changes to a schedule in real time," he said.
"We're not doing a good job of capturing best practices and institutional knowledge," added Sesh Commuri, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, "but machine learning can learn from our best practices and bring it seamlessly into our designs."
But attendees also were warned of cyber risks. While firms may think they are low on hackers' target lists, they may, in fact, be high-not for their own data, but for their customers', advised Michael Petrisko, senior vice president and CIO at Hill International. He cited the recent theft of Target Corp. data that investigators believe was enabled by access codes stolen from an HVAC contractor. "Who your clients are could be a critical concern," said Petrisko.
Risks include physical theft of equipment, such as internet hardware in a job trailer that may store addresses and passwords. Other risks include the increase of phishing attacks, which trick employees to click on dangerous links or voluntarily provide sensitive information.
Unfortunately, added John Jacobs, senior vice president and CIO at JE Dunn Construction Co., innovation in collaboration technology "flies in the face of security. Collaboration is inviting people you don't know to your data," he said. JE Dunn has 2,000 internal users on 800 project jobsites, but it has 30,000 external users, as well. "That's 30,000 people hitting data who I have no control over. Collaboration is an enormous, wrap-around risk," Jacobs said.
Jacobs added that construction firms have difficulty finding outside security experts to help protect their systems because the shifting partnerships required for construction are so much more complex and fluid than those of the security experts' usual clients, such as banks and retailers. But Reed Loden, director of security for Hackerone, a company that connects hacker security researchers with companies, gave attendees 12 security essentials. "Hackers are lazy. They go after the weakest link," Loden said.
