Yesterday, one of the oldest departments at Shanghai's universities, the Department of Civil Engineering at Tongji University, celebrated its 110th birthday. The College of Civil Engineering at Tongji University released the "Tongji University Action Plan for AI-Empowered Innovative Development of Civil Engineering Disciplines (2024-2027)," stating that the college will build on AI4SEE (AI for Science-Engineering-Education) to advance high-quality development of AI-empowered civil engineering disciplines through a three-year cycle, four core tasks, and 20 implementation measures.
At the event, the College of Civil Engineering released CivilGPT, a knowledge large model independently developed by the college. The model has recently completed filing with the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, becoming the first large model in China's education system to complete filing for generative artificial intelligence services. This is a research achievement arising from the intersection of knowledge engineering and civil engineering disciplines, and another innovative practice by Tongji University in exploring the digital-intelligent-driven transformation and upgrading of traditional engineering disciplines.
CivilGPT integrates 44 specialized courses, more than 500,000 pages of specialized corpus, over 2,600 course textbooks and standards, and 70,000 exam questions. Through training on a dataset of 7 billion tokens and a model with 72 billion parameters, it achieves precise understanding and efficient reasoning over the complex knowledge system of the civil engineering field. It adopts a hybrid architecture enhanced by a civil engineering professional knowledge graph independently constructed by Tongji University, including more than 11,000 knowledge points and over 13,000 relationships, enabling intelligent identification of weak knowledge points and recommendation of personalized learning paths for students. It also integrates knowledge from multiple engineering fields such as transportation, environment, mechanics, and materials, helping students address interdisciplinary engineering problems. Through round-the-clock Q&A, self-testing, and agent tools, the "teacher-student-machine" collaborative interaction creates a new personalized learning model for civil engineering education. It can also provide strong support for engineering practice activities and serve as an important intelligent assistant for engineers.
At the same time, the United Nations Development Programme and the College of Civil Engineering at Tongji University jointly signed a Memorandum of Understanding. The two sides will establish a strategic partnership to jointly build the UNDP Urban Disaster Resilience Innovation Laboratory (Tongji University), jointly exploring and testing cutting-edge technological solutions aimed at enhancing urban disaster reduction and climate resilience.
As the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation deepens, the Tongji civil engineering discipline is advancing toward the new in response to the changes and needs of the times. Not long ago, it established the Institute of New Energy System Infrastructure, focusing on scientific issues and key technologies in the construction of infrastructure such as power grids, wind power, and solar energy; established the China Smart Infrastructure Industry-University-Research Collaborative Innovation Platform to promote technological innovation and industrial application of smart infrastructure through industry-education integration; and, together with disciplines such as architecture, transportation, and economics and management, established the High-Speed Railway and Station-City Integration Research Institute to contribute wisdom to empowering new quality productive forces in railways.
In 2023, the State Key Laboratory of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation for Civil Engineering was officially approved for establishment by the Ministry of Science and Technology, shouldering new important missions and tasks. Focusing on major directions such as "life-cycle disaster prevention, multi-hazard prevention and control, intelligent disaster reduction, and resilience enhancement," it strives to build a national strategic scientific and technological force for civil engineering disaster prevention and safety and to continue achieving international leadership in civil engineering disaster prevention and mitigation science and technology. In 2022, it was approved to establish the State Key Laboratory of High-Speed Maglev Transportation Technology, strengthening organized scientific research to provide key support for the continued innovation and engineering industrialization of China's high-speed maglev technology.
"The series of exploratory practices by the civil engineering discipline in empowering innovative disciplinary development with artificial intelligence has brought inspiration to the transformation and upgrading of other disciplines at the university and provided a model worthy of reference," said Zheng Qinghua, President of Tongji University and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
"Standing at a new starting point of 110 years, I hope the civil engineering discipline will live up to expectations, uphold integrity and innovate, continue to lead the development of a world-class discipline with Chinese characteristics under first-class Party building, continue to shoulder responsibilities, write new glory, and lead China's civil engineering education toward a better future and a broader world stage," said Fang Shouen, Party Secretary of Tongji University.
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