ASCE has honored Jiansong Zhang, Ph.D., A.M.ASCE, with the 2025 Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction for his groundbreaking discovery of invariant signatures of architecture, engineering, and construction objects that laid the foundation for seamless and universal interoperability of BIM and for supporting full automation in various engineering and management tasks in the AEC domain.
Zhang’s established framework for automation in the context of BIM-based building code compliance-checking demonstrated the possibility of deep natural language processing (NLP) in a specific domain, automated conversion of the content into machine language suitable for automated reasoning, and showcased the feasibility of seamless and universal building information modeling (BIM) interoperability leveraging his ground-breaking discovery in invariant signatures of BIM objects. This work laid the foundation for fully seamless human computer interaction and computer-aided decision making in the future broad architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) domain and all disciplines that involve natural language. It also established a solid first step toward the high or full automation for all tasks in the life cycle of a project in the broad AEC domain. Zhang is a world-known expert on BIM and artificial intelligence.
The Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding scholarship that advances construction engineering as a science.
