Artificial intelligence is providing new opportunities in a range of fields, from business to industrial design to entertainment. But how about civil engineering and city planning? How might machine- and deep-learning help us create safer, more sustainable, and resilient built environments?
A team of researchers from the NSF NHERI SimCenter, a computational modeling and simulation center for the natural hazards engineering community based at the University of California, Berkeley, with researchers from UC Berkeley, the International Computer Science Institute, Stanford, and UCLA, have developed a suite of tools called BRAILS -- Building Recognition using AI at Large-Scale -- that can automatically identify characteristics of buildings in a city and even detect the risks that a city's structures would face in an earthquake, hurricane, or tsunami.