It's ASC Plot Points. I'm Ben Walpole. All right, so I'm well aware that I could have used some kind of generative AI to help me write this intro today for this podcast. I didn't. This is just me talking to you out of my human brain.
Now perhaps some of you out there might argue that maybe it would have been better if I had used Generative AI, but that's not the point. The point is the AI option was there, and it's very easy nowadays to do so when it comes to simple writing like this, which is pretty cool.
What about in civil engineering, though? Does AI accessibility and usefulness extend there? Well, yeah, of course it does. We know that. But maybe more to the point, how does AI affect and help in civil engineering these days? We asked an expert. Dr. Ayanna Howard serves as the dean of the Ohio State University College of Engineering and has been on the cutting edge of AI research for more than three decades now. She was named one of the most...
Powerful Women Engineers in the World by Business Insider, and a Top 50 Woman in Tech by Forbes. So, obviously she knows her stuff, and she had plenty to say. Here's Ayanna Howard. Okay, well, you know, a lot of what we've been talking about lately is artificial intelligence as changing the future and kind of this look ahead. future tense sentences. But can you tell us about some things maybe that AI has already changed, you know, as we sit here today talking in June of 2024?
Yeah, so what I don't think a lot of people realize is that... If you wake up in the morning and you go to sleep at night, you are using some type of tool or gadget that has incorporated AI, especially with respect to algorithms. If you're using the latest... conferencing tool, whether it's Zoom or Teams, as an example, things around filtering, things around identifying your actions and then doing the emoji kind of.
animations. Those are all part of the intelligence that's behind a lot of the machines. If you are in a car and you're going into any type of automation mode. whether it's parking or line keeping, you are using a form of artificial intelligence. And so we are using AI in pretty much all aspects of our lives. We're just not using it in everything, but we are using it.
Pretty much every day. I always find that to be somewhat reassuring to think like that because then it isn't necessarily this terrifying future prospect. It's already something that is... you know, relatively incorporated into everyday life, like you're saying. You know, as far as civil engineers in particular, can you think of anything that you think civil engineers really should be using AI for already?
in their work? Yeah, so one of the things that civil engineers have started to do, I'm in the educational sphere, so I see this in some of the curriculum, is how do you use... data to do things more intelligently smarter. And so if you think about things like the digital twins, can I create a structure or can I create a... device or a bridge or a building where I can now
Think about modeling all the possibilities, whether it's thinking about sustainability, energy efficiency, what's going to happen if you have the winter apocalypse in, say, Atlanta. What happens? What kind of materials? do we need to think about? What kind of beams, what kind of materials? And so these are things that allow civil engineers to use data.
model the use of data that's correlated with buildings and infrastructure and the environment to create better structures, more sustainable structures. That modeling and that injection of information to come up with great insights is a form of AI. Now, I gather you've done a lot of research in terms of robots and human-robot interaction. Do you see anything with that that might play into the future of the way civil engineering is done?
Yeah, so what I see, and this is currently now, which of course is going to be more advanced, is when you're on site. So you're on a construction site. You always have your architects, you have your civil engineers, you have your own. And so how do you use surveying equipment in the form of drones or robots to look at not only your plans, but also align them with your...
actual construction. How do you think about putting in the different types of piping or electrical conduits and making sure that it actually matches to the specs that you have identified as an engine? All these things you can look at as the robots or the drones are the sensors that provide you. the data and the modeling so that you know or you can be pretty sure that your designs and your plans are matching what's going on in the field.
in real time. And so we're seeing that now. We see companies that are designing and developing and deploying and selling typically as services. these abilities to firms so that you can use them in the field as you're building and designing and moving forward.
You talk about seeing some of this stuff in the curriculum there. I mean, is this just going to be stuff that college graduates enter the profession with as kind of just... instinct not instinctive but like they're going to be very familiar with these tools and AI concepts as they enter the field I assume going forward yeah I think so. So here at Ohio State, we have, for example, a drone program where students are learning how to incorporate...
their ability to fly a drone, collect science, collect infrastructure data, collect sensor data, and then use it for projects. So the projects can be used for surveying a site. The projects can also be used for agriculture. And so that's curriculum that we've adopted here at Ohio State. Those are the kinds of examples of teaching students new skills that still couples with some of the fundamental theories that they're learning in the classroom. For yourself.
How did you find your way into this field? You know, was this something that you were always interested in growing up, this kind of high-tech world? Or how did it become the focus of your research? Yeah, so when I was pretty much since middle school, I knew I wanted to do robotics. I just didn't know what kind of robots. I actually thought I wanted to build a bionic woman. So you could think of it as more health care robotics.
But my first job in robotics was with NASA, was at JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And so my first career in robotics was really focused on science-driven robotics. How do you design the intelligence? for rovers to navigate in unknown terrain by themselves. So you can think of it as a standard mapping function, if you're thinking about civil engineers that have to work with surveyors.
That's what I was doing with my rovers was how do I survey the environment so that we can extract great science for the scientists and so they can make their discoveries. So that was my first career was science-driven robotics. Then when I joined academia, I still did science-driven robotics, but started doing a lot more in the healthcare robotics space. And so that...
naturally got me to where I first began when I thought about robotics and the bionic woman. That's amazing. So you were, you were attuned to this at a very young age. When you look at where... Go ahead, go ahead, please. No, no, no, I was. And I will say one of the reasons was because you saw all of the things that... journalists and science writers, science fiction writers, were creating and designing in their movies and their books. And at the time, I was like, oh.
that's really what I was drawn to. And I really say imagination fuels engineering, and engineering is now fueling imagination. And so I think we have this interplay of creativity. and engineering that allows us to build a better world. That's really beautiful. To be able to take that and make it your life's work and make it a reality is really cool.
Kind of a dream, you know, for a lot of kids, I'm sure. Do you feel like... AI, I think, has become a really hot topic in the last few years especially, and I think a lot of people are still kind of freaking out about what they've been able to see ChatGPT do. But somebody like you probably has seen this as more of a steady arc instead of just an overnight craze. What's been the biggest thing that has changed? in your time doing this research and in the field? Yeah, so I will say that the...
So AI is not new, although I think a lot of individuals are like, oh my gosh, where did this come from? How did I not see it? But I think what has changed is the... It's really what we call generative AI, which is the things like ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. And the ease of use of using generative AI in...
everyday work. That has been the change. Whereas the AI that I design and develop in my research and have in the past years, it still requires an engineer or computer scientist to actually do anything interesting. Now it's become a tool. easy to use as, say, opening up a document and typing or creating your own movie using whatever movie producer QuickTime application. And so that's the difference. And because of that difference...
What we're now seeing is an acceleration of AI where people are very much aware of using it in their day-to-day activities, in their work lives. making their lives more effective and efficient, but using it as a tool. And that's really the difference. It's no longer in the lab, in the research, behind the scenes. Like I mentioned, AI is pretty much in a lot of applications now, but now people are using it themselves. That's the change.
You can hear more from Dr. Howard on these topics at the ASE convention, October 6th through the 9th in Tampa, Florida. She'll be delivering the keynote address at the convention. You can learn more at convention.ase.org. That's convention. .asce.org.
AAC Plot Points is a production of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Please subscribe, rate, review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever podcast platform you prefer. Thanks so much to our guest today, Ayanna Howard. Our music is by Coltrane Motion. You can learn more at coltranemotion.com.
Keep up with everything going on at ASCE and throughout the entire civil engineering profession online at the civil engineering source at source.asce.org. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you again next week.