7 Days of News – Week 45

Here are our picks from the latest construction technology news.

“You look at 5G wireless, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), these are going to be three key technologies for your industry,” Michael Hainsworth, executive producer of Futurithmic and co-host of the Geeks & Beats podcast, told the audience at a talk billed Future Forward: Three Technologies That Will Change Our World Forever.

A cost-to-coast BIM survey in Canada received 398 respondents. Over 80% of the respondents agree that adopting BIM can provide visualization benefits, but only 54% thinks it improves profitability. This makes you think whether BIM is still something extra, not a replacement of old practices for many respondents.

Netherlands and Vietnam-based social enterprise Upp! is on a mission to fight the global plastic pollution crisis by closing the plastic waste loop with a local approach. Using a circular economy approach, Upp! hopes to save plastic waste from landfills and oceans by introducing circular plastic factories in 10 cities by 2025. 

Toggle, a Brooklyn-based 15-person startup that creates robotics that fabricate and assemble rebar, scored $3 million in seed funding. 

The Construction Industry is Poised for a Data Transformation. This data transformation has significant legs in construction, as evidenced by a recent report by Dodge Data & Analytics and Viewpoint: Improving Performance with Project Data.

Check out the 28 cities and projects that will move on as finalists for the 2019 World Smart City Awards.

News from the LA tech ecosystem: BuildOps integrates scheduling, dispatching, inventory management, contracts, workflow and accounting into a single software package for commercial real estate contractors.

Tide Construction has craned the last of 1,526 modules into place on the world’s tallest modular tower in Croydon.

AI in construction: generative design, risk mitigation, safety… An article by Anand Rajagopal, a data scientist at Autodesk.

Alice Technologies develops an AI-based construction simulation platform. Disperse captures and processes visual data from construction sites to create an interactive digital twin. Alice raised $8m and Disperse $15m in Series A funding.

Intel bids for ‘smartest building in the world’ title with new office. Check out the numbers: 2,700 workstations, 143 conf. rooms, 500+ smart screens, 14,000 sensors, 50-100 terabytes of data daily, a BMS with 970 APIs and 60,000 input fields. 40% more energy efficient and 75% less water consumed.