Artificial Intelligence will impact on almost all aspects of our lives, including our working lives. Advancements in computing power have made AI technology far more accessible in recent years meaning that the range of applications is expanding rapidly.
Everyone has heard of AI but few of us actually understand what it is and how it works. There will be a high level overview of AI as an introduction to this talk. Having established a degree of understanding of AI there will be a look at the range of applications where AI is already fully embedded and the impact that it has had.
In terms of the application of AI in civil and ground engineering there will be an exploration of some of current work where, over the last three to four years, AI based analytical systems have been developed to assist with the optimisation of hard rock quarrying production.
These applications span all aspects of quarrying from understanding the geological characteristics of the quarried rock, design of blasting, image analysis of the blast pile, analysis of ground borne vibration and air-overpressure and real time analysis of the processed aggregates at all stages of the production process.
There will also be an overview of current work that is looking to employ AI for the recognition and characterisation of peatlands and other critical habitats with a view to providing objective quantification of impacts and also habitat creation benefits.
Finally, there will be thoughts on where AI is heading in the industry and where in the near term impacts are likely to be most significant. This will involve consideration of what this could mean in terms of the way in which engineering services (and other service industries) are structured and provided in future. There will then be the inevitable debate – “what are we all going to be doing 10 years from now?”
