Many cities worldwide suffer from housing shortages or need to renovate their ageing building stock. Additionally, the construction industry is known for being inefficient, often overrunning budgets and where most workplace injuries occur. To fulfil the demands of cities, improve efficiency, and safety, investments are being made to enhance the digitalisation of this sector. Nonetheless, with the deployment of these technologies, impact to workers as well as privacy concerns come to the fore while remaining underexplored in practice.
To address this, BOLD Cities’ affiliated researcher dr. Jorge Pereira Campos has organised a workshop for construction industry stakeholders (amongst the participants were architects, engineers, and policymakers). During the workshop attention was paid to the GDPR principles at play, issues of workplace surveillance, the role of AI in the construction industry, the Energy Performance of Building Directives (EPBD) and privacy impact assessments.
With a keynote delivered by Anne Weidenbach (Member of the Cabinet of Commissioner Kadri Simon (Energy)), and presentations by Dr Joao Gonçalves (A.I. Scholar, Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Marlon Domingus (Data Protection Officer, Erasmus University Rotterdam) and guided break-out rooms, the 36 participants were able to hear from both experts and practitioners and discuss real-life examples themselves.
The workshop is one of the outcomes of the BIM-SPEED Project, a Horizon2020 project looking at improving the efficiency of the construction industry by promoting its digitalisation. On this project, dr. Jorge Pereira Campos in collaboration with Erasmus University Rotterdam’s colleagues dr. Jason Pridmore and dr. João Gonçalves are part of a consortium involving experts and researchers from the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania.
