CECE speaks about Digital Construction machines in international conference in Amsterdam
Organised by the German association of engineers VDI, the Smart Construction Equipment conference took place in Amsterdam on 3rd and 4th December 2018. CECE Secretary General Riccardo Viaggi was invited to deliver a presentation on the work being undertaken by CECE in the area of digital construction and machines.
Google ready to enter the Digital Construction scene with AI solutions
Particularly relevant was the presentation by Michiel Vanthoor of Google, focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence. An important information from his presentation was the confirmation of Google’s strategy to get closer to the market in Europe: Google is ready to engage with direct clients with a go-to-market plan for Europe and has identified the construction industry as a potentially interesting sector for this.
After outlining that the necessary elements of machine learning are Data – Expertise – Computing power, Mr Vanthoor of Google went on presenting the big challenge facing all newcomers to artificial intelligence: the need to focus on producing insights coming from data. This is often difficult because a lot of time and resources are initially devoted to data preparation and integration, which frustrates expectations and may increase fixed costs. In order to partially address this, Google developed TENSORFLOW and Edge Computing technologies, to offer expertise and computing power to businesses.
CECE makes a call to industry in prioritizing EU R&D funding
After an introduction on the EU policy supporting the digital transformation of EU Industry, the focus of CECE’s presentation was the collaborative approach that was started in Brussels among the different representatives of the construction industry value chain. The other main block of Riccardo Viaggi’s presentation was the CECE Digitalisation Project, whose final report is soon to be officially released on www.cece.eu. The importance of defining new data sharing mechanisms in order to reap the full potential of data as the core of future business models was highlighted as the main challenge facing the industry in the near future.
CECE confirmed the willingness to start this debate with the rest of the value chain representatives, also within the future EU projects that will be started thanks to EU funding coming from Horizon 2020 programmes on Digitizing European Industry initiative. On that note, CECE called the industry representatives present at the VDI Conference to come together and urge the European Commission to highlight Digital Construction as a priority sector for future R&D funding within Horizon Europe strategic goals and partnerships.
More news