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INSTRUCTORS:
Ken Donald, P.E., ENV SP
Eva Lerner-Lam, NAE, Dist. M.ASCE
Kelly Purnell, PMP
Nash Johnson, CCM
Sihan Li, Ph.D, P.Eng, CRM, ENV SP, M.ASCE
Course Length: 2 hours
Purpose and Background
This presentation was recorded at the ASCE 2025 Convention.
Balancing Carbon, Cost, and Construction Schedule in Bridge Projects (24 minutes)
This presentation introduces embodied carbon and explains how it is generated across the full lifecycle of bridge infrastructure—from material extraction to construction, maintenance, and end-of-life. The speaker highlights the massive carbon footprint associated with concrete and steel, emphasizing the scale of national bridge-deck replacement needs. A practical walkthrough of life-cycle assessment (LCA) shows how carbon is calculated using material quantities and global warming potential factors. The talk then shifts to reduction strategies, stressing that carbon must be treated like any other project risk and addressed through elimination, material efficiency, constructability, and only then low-carbon materials. An interactive design game demonstrates how different bridge configurations affect carbon, cost, and schedule, underscoring that no single “right answer” exists—tradeoffs must be evaluated at a system level.
AI and Transportation and Development Engineering: Current State of Practice and Emerging Opportunities (22 minutes)
This presentation reframes AI as “automated inference,” arguing that the term better reflects how computational tools support engineering decision-making. Drawing on experience in major transit agencies, the speaker emphasizes the need for verified and validated engineering data to ensure AI tools produce reliable outputs. The talk highlights the limitations of tech-industry data engineers in interpreting domain-specific engineering content, reinforcing the critical role of civil engineers in shaping AI knowledge bases. The speaker also introduces the concept of intelligence tokens and the emerging digital ecosystem that will govern how engineering knowledge is stored, attributed, and exchanged. The message is clear: civil engineers must actively participate in building AI-ready, trustworthy data systems to ensure safe and effective use of automated inference in transportation and development engineering.
Maritime Innovation Center: A Living Building Challenge Transformation (46 minutes)
The presentation examines how embodied carbon is generated across a bridge’s full life cycle, from material production and transportation to construction, maintenance, and end of life impacts. It explains the scale of the challenge using real bridge deck replacement data, noting that “just to make the concrete…you result in about 20 billion pounds of CO2” for deficient U.S. decks alone. The speaker then demonstrates how lifecycle assessment (LCA) quantifies these impacts and shows how design decisions—such as span configuration, material selection, precast versus cast in place elements, and construction methods—shift carbon, cost, and schedule tradeoffs. The session ultimately emphasizes that carbon reduction must be approached as a system level design risk, where minimizing material quantities, improving constructability, and using low carbon alternatives are integrated into standard engineering decision making.
Insights for Advancing Climate-Resilient Standards & Codes: Techniques for Addressing Nonstationary Climate in NBC 2025 & Initial Cost Assessment (20 minutes)
The presentation critiques traditional civil engineering practice that assumes a stationary climate and highlights why this mindset is incompatible with emerging AI driven, data-rich workflows. It emphasizes that domain experts—not data engineers—must verify and validate technical knowledge, noting that “a Google data engineer does not know how to parse…the tensile strength of steel for a bridge” and that civil engineers must take responsibility for the accuracy of engineering knowledge bases. The speaker explains how rapidly evolving AI ecosystems, GPU driven computation, and tokenized knowledge structures (such as Merkle-tree based attribution) are reshaping how engineering information is created, shared, and authenticated. Ultimately, the session argues that engineers must adapt beyond “PDF-era” workflows and prepare for a step change in practice, ensuring that future tools are grounded in validated engineering judgment rather than outdated assumptions about climate or technology.
Benefits and Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
- Describe how embodied carbon is calculated using material quantities and GWP factors, and evaluate
- Assess the role of verified and validated engineering data in ensuring reliable outputs from automated inference tools used in transportation and development engineering.
- Identify key design strategies used to meet Living Building Challenge imperatives and interpret how these strategies support regenerative, high-performance maritime infrastructure.
- Describe how emerging AI ecosystems, including verified and validated engineering knowledge bases and tokenized attribution structures, challenge conventional stationary climate engineering practice and require civil engineers to assume a central role in ensuring the accuracy, traceability, and reliability of technical information used in automated inference tools.
Assessment of Learning Outcomes
Students' achievement of the learning outcomes will be assessed via a short post-test assessment (true-false, multiple choice, and/or fill in the blank questions).
Who Should Attend?
- Architect
- Bridge Design Engineer
- Structural Engineer
- Transportation Engineer
- Project Manager
- Construction Engineering Manager
How to Earn your CEUs/PDHs and Receive Your Certificate of Completion
To receive your certificate of completion, you will need to complete a short on-line post-test and receive a passing score of 70% or higher within 365 days of the course purchase.
How do I convert CEUs to PDHs?
1.0 CEU = 10 PDHs [Example: 0.1 CEU = 1 PDH]