Defence of dissertation in the field of civil engineering, Vincent Kuo, M.Sc. (Eng.)

The public examination of the doctoral dissertation of Vincent Kuo, M.Sc. (Eng.) will be held on 22 March 2019 at 12.00 at the Aalto University School of Engineering. The title of the dissertation is Latent Semantic Analysis for Knowledge Management in Construction. Field of the dissertation is intelligent systems and knowledge management in civil engineering.

Are you interested in how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming data, information and knowledge management (KM) in the construction sector? The fragmented construction industry harbours immense potential for digital augmentation. We delve into how the text-based AI technique, latent semantic analysis (LSA), can enhance KM practices to tackle large scale domain challenges such as constructability, change management, and expert competence mapping, across the whole building lifecycle. We take you through a few investigations in real-world contexts and show that expert insights, traditionally dependent on domain-specific human reasoning, can be computationally inferred from readily accessible textual documentation (be it passively or actively generated) in construction.

In this dissertation, you'll further discover:

• Can knowledge creation theory remain relevant in the age of digitalization?
• Why is engineering knowledge so hard to manage and how to overcome these difficulties with AI?
• How to harness the power of LSA for various practical problems in construction?
• What are the implications for data models, ontologies, interoperability and building information modelling?

This research contributes to realizing some of the promises of AI and its tangible impact in real-world construction KM practices over myriad use-cases across the building lifecycle.

Opponent: Professor Arto Kiviniemi, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

Supervisor: Professor Juha Paavola, Aalto University School of Engineering, Dept Civil Engineering

Electronic dissertation: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-60-8456-5

Doctoral candidate’s contact information: Vincent Kuo, VXT Research Oy, [email protected]