Minutes of the Committee on Emerging Computing Technology (ECT)
ASCE Structural Division

2nd Congress on Computing
Atlanta Hilton and Towers

June 6, 1995
Atlanta, Georgia

email: emerging-tech@eiffel.ce.gatech.edu
URL: http://www.ce.cmu.edu:8000/people/user/jg9d/www/ect/home.html

Attendance: 11

Name Affiliation

Baker, Nelson - Georgia Institute of Technology
Baugh, John - North Carolina State University
Garrett, Jim - Carnegie-Mellon University
Ivezic, Nenad - Carnegie-Mellon University
Lakmazaheri, Sivand - Catholic University of America
Melhem, Hani - Kansas State University
Neggers, Meg - The Premisys Corporation
Pasley Greg - University of Kansas
Roddis, Kim - University of Kansas
Smith, Ian - Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)
Turkiyyah, George - University of Washington

1. Welcome to new visitors and introduction of attendees

The meeting was called to order by the committee chairperson, Jim Garrett. The meeting began around
8:05 pm.

Melhem passed extra copies of the minutes of April 1995 committee meeting. Garrett distributed to the
attendees a meeting handout. In addition to the proposed agenda, the package included the following:
(1) Letter and ECT Annual report sent to F. Cheng (5 pages)
(2) Sessions/Tutorials planned for 1996 SC conference in Chicago (8 pages)
(3) Table of Content of the Monograph on Neural Networks (1 page)
(4) Hard copies of the different pages of the ECT Homepage (8 pages)
(5) Present membership roster (2 pages)
(6) Call for sessions and Request Form 1997 SC Conference (2 pages)
(7) Call for papers for Conference at Strathclyde in August 1996 (2 pages)
(8) Letter from Committee on Computing in Construction (1 page)
(9) Membership form for new applicants (1 page)

2. Acceptance of minutes from last meetings

Minutes from June 1994 and April 1995 were reviewed. A motion was made to accept the minutes and
the motion was carried.

3. Review of Old Business

3.a Report on sessions at 1995 SC conference
This was confirmed as stated in the minutes of the April 95 meeting.

3.b ECT Annual report sent to F. Cheng
The report was reviewed in the meeting and was found to be accurate and correct. The role of
the ECT committee as a liaison with other committees was emphasized. Further joint activity with
these committees is highly desirable.

3.c Report on sessions at 1995 TCCP conference
The attendance at the session sponsored or supported by our committee at the 1995 TCCP
Congress was very good. Approximate peak attendance was as follows:
- Neural Network Tutorial: 25 persons
- World Wide Web Tutorial: 45 persons (not an ECT committee activity)
- Multimedia Tutorial: 35 persons

4. Discussion of Current Business

4.a Sessions/Tutorials planned for 1996 SC conference in Chicago
These are described in the meeting handout. The ones sponsored by our committee are:
-"Computational Support for Intelligent Structures"
Stuart Chen, State University of New York at Buffalo
-"Demystifying the Alphabet Soup of Emerging Computing Technology"
John Baugh, North Carolina State University
Jim Garrett, Carnegie Mellon University
-"Computer Models for the Life Cycle of Building Projects"
Meg Neggers, Premisys Corp.
-"Emerging Computing Technology in Practice"
Mohamed Elkordy, New York Department of Transportation
-"Object-Oriented Programming Techniques" - Tutorial
Meg Neggers, Premisys Corp.

ACTION ITEM: Jim Garrett will post an update through email regarding the deadlines for sessions
organization, instruction to authors, etc.

4.b Monograph on Neural Networks
Nabil Kartam and Ian Smith have been working hard on the monograph. An MS-Words version of
the manuscript will be sent next month to Frank Cheng and ASCE for review by both the ST and TCCP
committees.

ACTION ITEM: Ian Smith will initiate a second monograph on NN with help from Kartam.

4.c Form and Content of the ECT Mosaic Homepage
The URL is: http://www.ce.cmu.edu:8000/people/user/www/ect/home.html)
Comments were suggested on to how to improve it. Garrett is doing a great job in maintaining
it. Melhem suggested updating the Planned Activity Table. Neggers suggested adding a section on
"Previous Activities" which would include publications, sessions organized, monographs published, etc.
that our committee has been involved with. Lakmazaheri mentioned that we may add to the homepage
an invitation to join our committee, request for participation in committee activities, and information on
how the committee chair can be contacted.

ACTION ITEM: Melhem will regularly send Garrett an updated table of the "Planned Activities"
to include in the WWW along with the meeting minutes. Others who suggested changes are welcome to
do the same. All members are requested to provide their personal homepage to Garrett (if/when available)
so that he would link it to the ECT homepage.

4.d IEEE Expert Special Track on AI in CE
Garrett mentioned that this is a typical activity of the committee as a liaison with other groups on
the national and international level. Remarks from the April 95 meeting minutes were recalled by Melhem
regarding asking the members's approval if an individual's activity should be considered a committee
activity. Garrett stated that Melhem's special issue of Microcomputers in Civil Engineering on Computer-
Aided Bridge Engineering can be considered so.

4.e Membership roster update
Ian Smith mentioned that his name is not appearing on the membership list although he applied last
year to join the committee.

ACTION ITEM: Melhem will re-send a copy of Smith's application/data sheet to Frank Cheng for processing.

5. New Business

5.a Sessions/Tutorials for 1997 SC Conference
This is scheduled for April 13-16, 1997, in Portland, Oregon. Deadline for session request is June
15, 1995. Form is included in the meeting package.

Kim Roddis passed around copies of an abstract for a suggested session on "Constraint Based
Reasoning Applied to Optimization of Complex Structural Design." Several other topics were suggested
including Virtual Reality, Impact of the Information Super-highway on Structural Engineering, Validation
of Expert Systems with respect to engineering liability, and other topics. Baugh suggested that Roddis's
session can be considered a joint activity with the Optimization committee. Panel discussion would also
be appropriate for topics such as "expectation from distributed information." A panel would include
Industry representatives (1/2), and University/Government (1/2), the latter being from both an education
and research perspective.
The following were suggested:
- New Technologies for Classification of Data, by Hani Melhem, joint activity with the ST committee
on Experimental Analysis and Instrumentation.
- Virtual Reality, Garrett and Turkiyyah
- Constrained Optimization, Kim Roddis, possibly joint with Optimization committee.
- Panel Discussion on Distributed Information, Roddis and Neggers.

ACTION ITEM: Moderators should send the session requests to Gary Parks in Vancouver, and send
a copy to Garrett.

5.b Discussion of the track of session planned for 1998 SC Conference
In 1998 there will be a track in the congress for Analysis and Computation. Our committee should
activity participate. Smith passed around an ASCE news letter entitled Emerging Technologies.

ACTION ITEM: Garrett the conference chair before next year's meeting to arrange a subtrack foe
ECT and/or for International Cooperation, (e.g. with EG-SEA-AI). He will also make contacts to see if our
ECT committee could be represented or referred-to in this ASCE news letter.

5.c Interaction with EG-SEA-AI, our European counterpart, in August 1996
- Conference at Strathclyde in August 1996: Ian Smith invited members to attend. Garrett and
Roddis are planning to. Our representation is appreciated much like in Bergamo in May 1995 (Garrett,
Roddis, and Melhem were there.)

- Industrial Questionnaire: Smith is initiating this activity in Europe. This include industries that
have (successfully) used Advanced Computer Methods (ACM) in their companies activity and business.
The participation of ECT is solicited. Garrett assigned Lakmazaheri for this activity. (In the April meeting,
Melhem offered that he can work with Smith on that, and later in July and through email Garrett relieved
Lakmazaheri from this task if does not want to do it).

5.d Letter from Committee on Computing in Construction
Same comments as the April 95 meeting.

5.e Additional activities to be started or considered.
During the 1995 SC Conference, we could all visit Negger's company in Chicago. (No free lunch?)

6. Adjournment.

Meeting was adjourned around 10:45 pm.

Submitted by:

Hani Melhem (secretary)