Course Reflection - zhijing zheng

Course Reflection-Construction field

Intelligent building information and techniques are very beneficial to current society. During this class, I had been told the advanced technique such as 3D printing or robotics implementation. It is pretty fascinated that future construction field implement more robotics principle.  Additional, the AI technique is one of the main advanced information. My major is mainly focus on structural engineering and I prefer the building industry. Therefore, it is very helpful and meaningful support information from building perspective. Especially, nowadays, current building systems implement sensors to monitor and analyze the building and provide necessary database for LCA. There are different types of sensors such as temperature, electrical or pressure. Among these sensors, the typical types of sensor that applied for building are temperature sensor, humidity sensor and smoke sensor. For me, when the building contain these advance techniques for either construction purpose or managing g and monitoring purpose, it is sounds like artificial intelligent for me. It looks like the buildings can function and run by themselves. The human beings just gather the data from the screen. Then, organize the data into logical format. In order to sort and store the uncountable data, we need to create the database to accomplish that. Therefore, in this class, I learned the SQL terminology, which is a domain-specific language, used in programming and designed for managing data held in a relational database management system [1]. Also, I learned the surface about the MS access application to create the database to organize the sensor information for each room from each building. The implementation of database is very useful for my future career; I am working for engineering firm and specialize for construction service. From my perspectives, I feel the database is very useful for construction purpose; it will shorten the duration to recreate the relationship or formula for similar information. An advanced database system and technology will become high demand from all construction fields such as infrastructure, aviation and heavy highway.

From construction perspective, it is quite beneficial of applying database techniques. For example, the construction routine is deal with tons of paper trial and data such as submittals and shop drawing. If there is an improved database system can serve each construction category like aviation. For example, if PHL want to extend the runway 9R-27L, DOA could just pull out the similar project by defining the similar underground soil condition or similar region. It will help to avoid to irrelevant uncertainty and save the time for designer. 

Comment

Arthur Mccloskey

In Arthur’s post, he lists the overall topics from this class, which is helpful to audience to notice the big picture. Also, he provides the personal experience as construction management. And he mentioned the BIM is priority for his career. He also states that database is useful for his career and provide the reason. Overall post is well organized and clear.  And I totally agree the point of view from the construction perspective.

https://ae-410-510-ay16-17.blogspot.com/2017/03/course-reflection-arthur-mccloskey.html

Sarah Maminski

In Sarah’s post, she mentions as new learner for BIM and database, she express the general feelings about the new topic like little bit of everything. She has not dig into deep to explore that into professional perspective due to the limited experiences. I think she can probably just search for one topic and go deep to explore the topic as another chance of self-learning. 

https://ae-410-510-ay16-17.blogspot.com/2017/03/b7-course-reflection.html

Egla Qori

In Egla’s post, she incorporate her real work experiences with intelligent building course and appreciate that she took this class. I totally agree her points. In real work, it is always good to know a little bit of everything can help the team member to complete the project.

https://ae-410-510-ay16-17.blogspot.com/2017/03/b7-course-reflection-egla-qori.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL

B7 - Abdullatif Alkandari

Course Reflection

When I first signed up for “Intelligent Building” I expected it to be a course that specifically deals with the smart methods construction and operation of buildings. However, the course proved to be much more diverse than that and turned out to touch on numerous aspects of technology that is implemented in the construction industry. And I truly enjoyed the opportunity that the course gave me to research different topics and share my findings with other classmates via the course blog as well as the chance to pick the topic for my term project; which makes the course experience feel more personal.

Affects on my Professional Career

Aside from the numerous applications of Artificial Intelligence that were covered in class, the assignments that we had working with Revit and MS Access have really opened my eyes to the future career possibilities. And by working with these software I now have a better idea of how they can make a construction manager’s job much easier because that is the aspect that I am interested in the most. The knowledge of databases and how much they facilitate data entry and retrieval is a skill that I expect to benefit from along the course of my career.

Conclusion

This course has made me even more eager about the future especially with the many intriguing guest speakers that shared their career stories with us and gave us an idea of how exciting life can be after graduation. I was personally really inspired by Kristen & Derek’s presentation about Whiting-Turner and that made me more serious about chasing a career in construction management. And I have recently decided to take care of the 3D modeling of my senior design group using Revit because I expect this software to be very important for my career and I am glad that this course mad me realize that as well as the potential of different software that can make my life much easier once I fully understand them.

Reflection on the course

When I signed up to take AE 410, I expected it to be more of a designing class that will teach more on how to work with SketchUp and AutoCAD. On the contrary, I learned very new concepts in this course which I think opened my eyes on very new topics for me in my major.

The course focused on Artificial Intelligence, BIM and Databases. Before taking this course, I had a very basic idea on how robots are constructing in big factories, but I did not realize how the robots are also being used in construction fields, and how intelligent they are programmed to overcome obstacles and receive commands for several tasks.

Another topic that I was expecting to learn about in this course and that we went through and understood very well was 3D printed buildings. Before taking this course, I really wanted to learn more about the 3D printed buildings advantages, how they are constructed and put together and whether they are used nowadays or are still being developed. We understood it very well from professor Mitchell’s explanation, and my peers’ blogs that introduced new information and have taught me a lot.

Reflection on my professional career and future:

I believe that AI plays a huge role in BIM, and have been and developing the industry in so many aspects. My plan now is to go back to Kuwait after I graduate and hopefully work in one of the Architectural firms. I am very sure that they use BIM and such developed technologies. I also know that in Dubai they are relying on 3D printed buildings, Kuwait work on many projects with Dubai as well as exchanging experiences, so hopefully after learning so much about the 3D printed buildings I can have a hand on one of the projects which I am very excited for.

Another useful tool we used was Microsoft Access creating Databases. Even though I faced few trouble and errors on the assignments, I have a clear idea on Queries and relationships which I really believe I would benefit from it in my professional career. I also learned very much about sensors which I didn’t have a clear background about before this class.

One of the most effective things in this course were the guest speakers that use what we are learning in their daily work. That showed me how important all the topics we learned are and gave me a push to read more about everything and, I was always interested in reading my classmate’s blogs to learn new aspects of the topic.

In conclusion, the class was much deeper in the topics than I anticipated it to be and very useful to me, my major and in my future career for sure. I believe that professor Mitchell’s useful presentation and videos were very helpful. The videos that were showed to us in class, especially the robots working on construction and overcoming obstacles to do specific tasks, in addition to the blogs and guest speakers were very helpful and taught us a lot. The course was very interesting, we had so much fun while learning the new topics, and hopefully we can use all that we learned in our future jobs.

Response to peers
Nick Pawlikowski : It is great that you knew about most of the topics in this course. To me even though I knew few topics, I was not familiar with the great deep information provided in the lectures and blogs by our colleagues. I as well had never worked on Databases and I enjoyed it and like working on it this course I really think it helped me a lot.

Joe Dressel : I agree with most of what you said about the course. I strongly agree that the guest speakers were very helpful, they brought us a lot of prospective as you said and shared their experience on the topics which helped us very much.

Ronald Herazo: I strongly agree that professor Mitchell did a great job teaching this course and really helped us a lot and made it so much fun for us. Most of the topics even though we had a basic idea about, deep information were shared, reading the blog posts helped introduce more information and finally the guest speakers also sharing their experience gave us the best idea possible. 

Alsaleem B5 – Object oriented databases

Object oriented databases are also known as Object Database Management Systems (ODBMS). Object databases store objects rather than data such as integers, strings or real numbers. Objects consist of Attributes or Methods.

Attributes are data which defines the characteristics of an object. This data may be as simple as integers, strings, and real numbers or it may be a reference to a more complex object. However, Methods are the behavior of an object and are what was formally called procedures or functions.

Therefore, it can be stated that object oriented databases contain both executable code and data. There are other characteristics of objects such as whether methods or data can be accessed from outside the object.

One other term used is Classes. Classes are used in object oriented programming to define the data and methods the object will contain. The class is like a template to the object. The class does not contain data or methods within itself but defines the data and methods that are contained in the object. Classes are used to represent a certain thing within the object. Classes may be used in object databases to recreate parts of the object that may not actually be stored in the database. Methods may not be stored in the database and may be recreated by using a class.

Object databases should be used when there is complex data or complex data relationships. This includes a many to many object relationships. Object databases should not be used when data is simple and relationships are simple.

Object oriented databases work well with:

• CAS Applications (CASE-computer aided software engineering, CAD-computer aided design, CAM-computer aided manufacture)
• Multimedia Applications
• Object projects that change over time.
• Trading and Commencing

Object oriented Database Advantages over RDL

• Objects don't require assembly and disassembly saving coding time and execution time to assemble or disassemble objects.
• Reduced paging
• Easier navigation
• Better concurrency control - A hierarchy of objects may be locked.
• Data model is based on the real world.
• Works well for distributed architectures.
• Less code required when applications are object oriented.

Object oriented Database Disadvantages compared to RDL

• Lower efficiency when data is simple and relationships are simple.
• Relational tables are simpler.
• Late binding may slow access speed.
• More user tools exist for RDL.
• Standards for RDL are more stable.
• Support for RDBMS is more certain and change is less likely to be required.

Sources:

http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/definition/object-oriented-database-management-system

http://www.comptechdoc.org/independent/database/basicdb/dataobject.html

Responding to peers

Egla Qori – Your explanation for the SQL language was very clear and helpful. The operations are mostly very common, I am not very sure but I believe I have used a SQL language for a previous class therefore I agree how important it is learning SQL to enable a user to interpret data.

Ronald Herazo -  You did a great job explaining what a relational database is and introducing the background knowledge needed to understand it helped a lot. My only point that I wish you explained better was the comparison at the end, I believe if you stated some examples it would have been clearer and more interesting.

Prahlad – I enjoyed your blog about databases. Introducing the concept then giving examples, furthermore introducing where and how it is used in firms and hot people work with databases really gives the reader a great idea. Very clear post, great examples and very straight forward.