Open to All BIM session 23rd March

By Iain Miskimmin

On the 23^rd of March COMIT held an Open to All session aimed at giving a common understanding to all parties about this thing called “BIM”.

Even though it was sponsored by one of our technology members, Bentley Systems and we are a mobile technology community, the session was not about software but about the background, reasons, standards, methods and principles that need to be understood and linked together to really understand what it’s all about.

The 16 strong audience was made up of Owners, Contractors, Consultants, Universities and Technology vendors. Some were just starting down their BIM journey, others were BIM consultants for their organisations, which meant that the conversations and discussions surrounding each area of interest were a learning curve for everyone!

The session started with the financial crash and looking at what options the UK had for growing the economy. This spawned the Construction Strategy and ultimately the drive to deliver BIM on all government funded assets.

Taking the audience through the Government Soft Landings document and it’s vision for a more socially, economically and environmentally positive outcome for our assets, it then plunged down through the details of what is an asset, how do we break then down, and how we ought to identify the duty rather than the product.

Finally taking everyone through the 8 pillars of BIM wisdom and making sure they know why they are being asked to comply with things like COBie, Uniclass and the suite of 1192 documents.

The big lesson from the event was that we have things in place to manage, process, secure, classify, exchange, number and identify our assets, but we are still lacking the fundamental building block of WHAT information we require at each stage (not for a product but for an assets duty).

This information is needed to answer the critical questions throughout the life-cycle, but these still have not been clearly defined.

Everyone in the audience will have different critical questions to answer, depending on how they engage and interact with an asset, but they all understood that delivering the information using the same classification, asset data dictionary, templates, libraries, coordinate systems, standards and workflows ensures that there is a consistency involved that significantly reduces the risk of whole life-cycle asset procurement.

Some of the COMIT member feedback so far:

“Your fire and your enthusiasm for the topic “BIM” was absolutely infective and exemplary.” - Owner

“May everyone get the chance to join one of your presentations, you are indeed preparing the ground for reaching a new level in the construction fields.” - Owner

“I found it extremely useful and very interesting” - Contractor

“Highly impressed of what can be done and we all took inspiration and understanding with us” – Consultant

“The best BIM overview I have seen delivered anywhere. It’s a must for all people interested in this subject” - Contractor

“Presented in such a way we can all understand what our part is in the BIM story” - Academics

“Thank you for your time and extremely interesting and well-articulated presentation, even though we felt ourselves BIM aware, this session took us to new levels of understanding” – Technology Vendor

If you would like to know more about BIM or COMIT, then please visit our website or contact us to see how you could get involved.

AI Go challenge win spells boon not doom

So Google's AI has won the final game in the Go challenge against a master player - making it 4 games out of 5. If you are unfamiliar with Go or with the challenge then you might want to read the BBC story about the victory.

This has prompted a new spate of humans-doomed-by-AI stories. However, this misses one fundamental aspect that seems to be missing in a lot of the stories about AI lately - namely that they relate to the application of AI to things that people are naturally bad at.

When applying any technology to automate a human activity, be it physical or mental, it makes total sense to look at activities that human beings struggle with. After all, there has to be a commercial aspect to the application, even if to start with only in principle. Nobody would argue that mechanical excavators are a threat to a species with a finite capacity for digging, rather they are seen as a boon, so what is it with AI and games?

Games, by definition, need to be fun and an important part of that comes from the challenge they represent - they need to be hard and require some effort to learn, to play or to master. Go is a game that has a perfectly logical basis but a vast number of permutations. Part of the challenge to a human player is to persuade that three pound organ of general intelligence in our heads to apply itself to that domain. This is not easy - it is not a task for which our brains were optimised by our evolutionary past; which is part of what makes it fun.

However, those same brains can determine what are more optimal strategies and while we cannot change our brains to apply them we can embed them in machines that do - machines dedicated to that domain. So we can create computers that can beat Go Grand Masters - or even the best human players at "Jeopardy".

The mistake, is to assume that because we can do something as humans and we find it hard, that means it must be fundamentally hard to do - or alternatively, that because we find something easy, that it must be easy to do. I'm old enough to remember that in the early days of AI it was assumed that it would take a long time to develop a human-beating chess computer but a relatively short time to develop software that could understand human speech. That assumption could not have been more wrong. Chess turned out to be a relatively trivial AI problem, where as speech recognition in comparison was fiendishly difficult.

So what does this mean for the Google AI Go victory and why is this article on a construction related blog? Well, the point is that AI is getting better and better at doing the kinds of things that people find fundamentally hard to do - and as it happens the construction industry contains a great many of those things.

The way in which we currently estimate, plan, schedule, manage and design has many aspects that require human beings to make decisions that they are fundamentally bad at. Decisions where people are apt to overlook things or make mistakes or simply reach non-optimised solutions. The construction industry has made great strides in mechanising (and even automating) its physical processes and it has certainly applied computer technology to marshalling ever increasing amounts of data - but as yet the use of AI to help the decision making process is all but absent.

The application of domain-specific AI to construction could lead to as many benefits as mechanisation. It could free people up to do what people are good at and lead to major improvements in quality, efficiency, safety and most importantly for all of us working in the industry, job satisfaction. The concept of "big data" is just starting to touch on that potential but the application of the kind of AI involved in the Go challenge could and probably will be revolutionary.

So if the current AI developments are a boon, when should we start to worry? Probably when it becomes artificial general intelligence and starts to be better than us at things that human beings find easy to do. Such as understanding the meaning of something within an arbitrary context - or even convincingly demonstrating an understanding of what meaning actually is.

Oxford Brookes & Gender Balance in Construction

I had the pleasure last night of delivering the COMIT guest lecture to second-year Construction Project Management and QS students at Oxford Brookes University. Part of our remit at COMIT is to engage with the next generation of construction professionals and this fixture has become a regular event on our calender. Previous lectures have been delivered by Neill Pawsey and Stephen Smith as well as by me.

The lecture is primarily about the use of mobile computing in construction. However, I always find it helps to put things into context so I inevitably cover a number of the broader issues that the industry faces - particularly those that influence the use of technology - as well as a bit of history.

Since yesterday was International Women's Day it made sense to touch on the issue of gender balance - or more accurately imbalance - in construction. This is something that I have always been aware of and during my time working in the industry I have been pleased to see it improving.

However, it was not until I went hunting for some actual figures to use in my presentation that I realised just how bad the situation is:

(Image source: http://www.cnplus.co.uk/Pictures/web/u/v/e/Gender-balance-by-sector-ons-data-on-percentage-of-women-in-each-industry.jpg)

I was not surprised that construction is among the worst industries for gender imbalance (I expect mining would be similar if separated from energy and water), but at 12% I was surprised at just how bad it is. Especially since, as I mentioned earlier, I have seen significant improvements in my time in the industry. When I first entered construction some twenty years ago female site engineers were virtually unheard of. Now, in some companies I deal with, close to 50% of new graduate engineers are women.

This imbalance is something that has always be in evidence at COMIT community days. There have been a number of campaigns recently aimed at getting more women into engineering in general and into construction in particular. COMIT strongly supports these initiatives, but it is hard to know how best to help beyond re-posting positive messages on social media.

I was encouraged to see a number of women in the audience at Oxford Brookes and afterwards I spoke to Henry Abanda, Senior Lecturer and organiser of the event about the gender balance. Henry made a really interesting observation - although they had far fewer women on the course than men, the women tended to be among his best students.

I assumed this would be because they were more motivated - if they are seeking to join an industry that generally seems to discourage women and have overcome the societal expectation that it is a "male" career, then they must really want to be civil engineers. But Henry put me right. Almost without exception the women on the course had relatives who already worked in construction. Consequently they knew exactly what they wanted to do and exactly what they needed in order to do it.

For me this was a light-bulb moment. Women with first-hand knowledge of the industry know that it can be a rewarding and fulfilling career choice for them and while, given the poor gender balance, there are still many barriers, these are not significant enough for their relatives already in the industry to succeed in putting them off. In other words the problem is not just one of internal reality but of external perception.

I believe this is reinforced by the furore that erupted around the Construction Computing Awards ("The Hammers") last November following the sexist nature of the entertainment booked for the event. While the organisers clearly failed in their duty to ensure the material was appropriate, what strikes me is that the comedian concerned equally clearly held the view that a "construction" event was akin to a old-fashioned northern working-men's club.

This point is made by some of the commentators on Sue Butcher's excellent blog about the night. Many of those within the industry found the "entertainment" offensive, but those providing it were not familiar with the industry and clearly thought it appropriate.

Given that women only make up about 12% of the construction workforce the industry clearly has a very long way to go. However, the improvements that have taken place over the last couple of decades are dramatic. I would have imagined that would have been the hardest part - actually changing attitudes and the opportunities for women within the industry itself - but perhaps the hardest part is actually communicating those changes to the wider public.

Maybe re-posting positive messages on social media is not such an insignificant contribution to improving the gender balance in construction after all.