Congratulations to Eden Li and Mark Griffin for winning two awards for their conference paper at the World Building Congress 2022, organised by CIB, the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction! Their paper, Building a data-driven future for construction teams? Capabilities matter, won in two categories:
In the January 2022 edition of the newsletter, we described how Theme 5 is working to translate the Centre's outputs into industry-usable software to increase the impact of the Centre's research. Let's check in again to see how Theme 5 has been working with the Centre's researchers and industry partners on some recent translation projects.
In May, Ayham Zaitouny and John Hille demonstrated the IDEA Tool prototype to the Centre's Operating Committee and senior academics.
These demonstrations resulted in valuable feedback on the nature of the questions asked by the tool and on the tool's technical features.
To streamline the tool's use, Theme 5 undertook a minor re-engineering exercise to convert the tool's user interface to Streamlit.
The new Streamlit-based version has many benefits over the previous prototype, including a more responsive user experience.
John Hille and Alex Hunt have been working on a project to showcase the Centre and its researchers. This work includes building a platform to demonstrate the tools produced.
As part of the showcase project, the Centre's public website will soon be refreshed to incorporate outputs such as presentations, publications and software tools produced by the Centre's researchers.
Stay tuned for the transition to the new website in the coming weeks!
John Hille and Yunlong Li have been working with Hoa Bui and Mojtaba Heydar on improving the schedule optimisation tools. Considerable progress has been made since the start of the year. In addition to the schedule visualiser tool, the comparison and optimiser tools are now fully working prototypes.
The comparison tool is a designed to help a user compare multiple schedules. It allows a user to easily compare the duration, number of tasks and overall resource requirements between different schedules.
The tool supports the comparison of manually generated or automatically optimised schedules generated by the optimiser tool.
The optimiser tool provides a user-facing mechanism to exercise the schedule optimisation models produced by the Centre's Theme 3 researchers.
It allows a user to define the following input data:
Using this input data the user can use a choice of different optimisation models to generate different optimised schedules. Other features of the tool include:
Andrew Rohl and John Hille presented a code quality workshop to Centre researchers at the Australian Resources Research Centre (ARRC).
The workshop focused on the importance and mechanics of measuring code quality using standard linting tools such as pylint. Andrew and John also introduced some practical approaches to improving code quality.
The Centre was invited to exhibit our research at the Data-Driven Decision (D3) Conference held at UWA on 21 July.
A/Prof Wei Liu described some of the latest advances in natural language processing (NLP); Prof Melinda Hodkiewicz participated in a panel discussing insights, successes and failures for data-driven decisions; and Prof Michael Small judged the best presentation pitched by UWA HDR students.
The conference focused on why data-driven decisions are essential in generating real-time insights and predictions to help optimise business performance. CTMTDS staff and students who staffed the exhibit got the opportunity to listen to the presentations and panel discussions.
During the breaks, conference attendees visited our exhibit to find out more about the Centre. PhD students Sandy Spiers and Braden Thorne did a great job of explaining their own - and other people's - research to D3 attendees!