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

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.