Kiewit Drone Progress Tracking Application

Kiewit is one of the largest construction companies in the world and has long pushed the standards for innovation within the construction industry. Kiewit operates on an initiative to be a data-driven organization. Construction projects track progress data for a variety of reasons, none more important than meeting contractual obligations. Keeping clients in tune with the status of a given project not only gives them peace of mind but also correlates directly with revenue. For solar projects, quantity claiming is done by walking up and down rows of solar panels, posts, and torque tubes across the project site and manually entering the status data. The project goal was to create a secondary automated version of the manual quantity claiming process for construction progress tracking. The Kiewit Drone Progress Tracking application serves as a digital management system that supports tracking the progress of solar panel construction sites in a more streamlined way. It hosts a machine learning model that was built in-house. It predicts the progress of the construction site based on drone-captured geo-location tagged images called GeoTIFFs. The application hosts these GeoTIFFs and allows for the creation and display of labels that ultimately help train and run the machine learning model. The development of this application will increase the training data used to impact the accuracy of the AI model, as well as improve accessibility and efficiency for the current solution and provide the platform for expansion to other construction project types

Serving higher education with technology – disrupting higher education with technology

Technology is increasingly serving higher education by enabling student-centred learning and concerted social learning, extended reach to content anytime and everywhere, insights for educators into progress tracking and learning trends, and cross-institutional academic collaboration. At the same time, technology is providing evidence of negative disruption to the core purpose of education, which is human development and individual preparation for the future. Technology is gradually diminishing the capacity of individuals to critically think and reason, to expand into unfamiliar knowledge domains, and to exploit the learning experience to fulfil the market needs after graduation. In this paper, a review is presented on how technology is disrupting higher education, both positively and negatively. Some recommendations are given with respect to these disruption

The Effects of Lesson Study Concept on the Online Engineering Course Delivery

Short Abstract: Introducing the “Learning Progress Tracking System (LPTS)” that allows the instructor to effectively monitor students’ Lesson Study outcomes for the online delivered engineering courses. Full Abstract: One of the biggest challenges of use Lesson Study pedagogy for online delivery course lies in the “live observation”. “Live observation” is critical for the Lesson Study because it allows the instructor to track the student learning during the class period. It is hard to “observe and track” learning process for the online students. In order to overcome this challenge, the research team developed a “Learning Progress Tracking System (LPTS)”. The function of LPTS is to reflect students’ learning outcomes at different stages. This LPTS system includes learning progress, learning outcome, time intervals between each learning stage, and other parameters