Report for ISSMGE TC309/TC304/TC222 Third ML dialogue on “Data-Driven Site Characterization (DDSC)”

ABSTRACT

The ISSMGE TC309/TC304/TC222 Third Machine Learning in Geotechnics Dialogue (3MLIGD) was hosted online by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute on 3 December 2021. There is a consensus that the potential of digital transformation in geotechnical site characterisation is significant. Nonetheless, there is a clear-eyed recognition that the industry is currently governed by a set of rules that evolved from Industry 3.0 and it is only beginning to explore the potential of digital technologies. This state is to be expected as digital transformation is expected to change the “rules of the game” in the context of Industry 4.0 that is rapidly evolving in tandem with emerging technologies. The number of practitioners and researchers who are interested in data-centric geotechnics remains a small minority. There is a unanimous view that this small community can achieve greater impact and hasten progress by fostering more collaborations and working more closely together through: (1) data sharing, (2) creating a “yellow page” of people and projects to facilitate greater connectivity, (3) establishing novel collaborative modes between industry and academia, (4) demonstrating value through “ML supremacy” projects that include mapping studies covering large, real-time, multi-source datasets over large spatial domains, and (5) educating young talents by creating ML internships.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• machine learning
• Data-Driven Site Characterisation (DDSC)
• data-centric geotechnics
• digital transformation

Acknowledgements

The 3MLIGD was supported by ISSMGE TC309 (Chair, Dr Zhongqiang Liu), TC304 (Chair, Prof Jianye Ching), and TC222 (Chair, Dr Magnus Rømoen). It could not be held successfully without the enthusiastic participation and contributions from all the invited experts (refer to the list of 3MLIGD participants in Appendix 1). The organisers would like to thank Dr Mats Kahlström (TC222 secretary) for giving the presentation before group discussions and providing a summary of the presentation in this report. Special thanks go to group facilitators and reporters for their significant efforts in coordinating group discussions and contributing a summary of their discussions to this report. The organisers also extend our appreciation to Dr Jiyang Ye (Norwegian Geotechnical Institute) for making the online arrangements and contributing to the successful hosting of 3MLIGD. Finally, the organisers are grateful for the invitation from Professor Limin Zhang, Editor-in-chief for Georisk, to prepare this report as a Conference Report.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://ec.europa.eu/info/research-and-innovation/funding/funding-opportunities/funding-programmes-and-open-calls/horizon-europe/cluster-4-digital-industry-and-space_en.

2 https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/infrastructure-industrialization/.

3 https://orangedatamining.com/.

4 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/.

5 https://www.datarobot.com/.