Wen-der Yu

Professor, Department of Construction Engineering, Assistant Vice President for International Affairs, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan

Wen-der Yu (PhD, Professional Civil Engineer, Certified IPMA Project Manager, PMP) is currently a Professor of the Department of Construction Engineering, also serves as Assistant Vice President for International Affairs at Chaoyang University of Technology, Taiwan. He received his BS degree from the Department of Civil Engineering of National Central University, Taiwan. After then, he was awarded the Annual National Scholarship for Oversea Study (ANSOS) by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan, to pursue his MSCE and Ph.D. degrees in Purdue University of USA.

Dr. Yu started his academic career in Chung Hua University as a professor in Construction Engineering. In Chung Hua University Dr. Yu has served many academic administration positions including Chairman of the Department of Construction Engineering, Dean of Student Affairs, and Dean of Office of Research and Development. Dr. Yu is also active in the construction academia in Taiwan. He served as the Chairman of the Committee of Construction Project Management, Taiwan Project Management Association (TPMA); Vice Chairman of the Committee of Publication, Chinese Construction Management Association; Member of the Committee of Engineering Management, Chinese Institute of Civil and Hydraulic Engineering; Assessor of IPMA Certified Project Manager, TPMA; Assessor of  Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Center of Taiwan.

In addition to his academic career in Taiwan, Dr. Yu was also a Visiting Professor of Reading University, UK, in 2004, University of Sydney, Australia, in 2010, and Purdue University in 2012. He also serves as a members in the International Committee of many international conferences, including the International Conference on Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Computing, the CRIOCM International Symposium on Advancement of Construction Management and Real Estate, the International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction, and the Creative Construction Conference. Dr. Yu is a member of the editorial board in several in several international research journals, including Automation in Construction and International Journal of Construction Management. He has been served as a reviewer for many international research journals, including Journal of Construction Engineering and Management (ASCE), Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering (ASCE), Automation in Construction, International Journal of Construction Management, Construction Management and Economics, International Journal of Project Management, etc.

Dr. Yu’s research interests include construction project management, knowledge management, construction innovation, and artificial intelligence applications in construction engineering. He has published more than 300 publications in Chinese and English. He also received many academic awards, including the A-Class Research Award (2000), National Science Council, Taiwan; Best Paper Awards from many institutions, including the Sewage Engineering Association; the Cross-Strait TRIZ Research Conference; the Chinese Construction Management Association; Chinese Institute of Civil and Hydraulic Engineering. He also received the Distinguished Research Award from Chung Hua University; the Distinguished Civil Engineering Alumni from National Central University, etc. Dr. Yu focuses his current research on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrated with Building Information Modelling (BIM) for construction engineering and management.

 

How Artificial Intelligence Will Shape the Future of Construction
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Artificial intelligence (AI) has been changing our lives for decades, but never has AI felt more ubiquitous than now. The recent development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially the deep learning neural networks (DLNN), has demonstrated their capability to defeat most intelligent humans in playing Go games. It is expected to impact our future in every aspects. The construction discipline is not an exception. AI applications in construction engineering and management have experienced prosperous development during 1990~2000. The booming development faded after 2000 due to the limitation of computational capacity of computer. The new generation of AI development resumed since 2006 when the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) was adopted as simple massive processing units for parallel computations. In 2012, with the new computational algorithms of DLNN, a new wave of AI applications for processing of the bid data in image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition has shown the dramatic potentials to impact the human lives including construction engineering and the way of engineering education. In this talk, the most advanced developments AI applications in construction engineering and management will be demonstrated with real life examples. Some most adventurous projects will be explored to probe the inevitable impacts of AI to the construction industry.