The University of Texas at Austin says it received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to teach new technology to construction workers.

The grant went to William O'Brien; assistant professor of civil engineering; Randolph Bias, associate professor of information; Christine Julien, assistant professor of computer engineering, and Kathy Schmidt, director of the university's Cockrell School of Engineering's Faculty Innovation Center. It will allow them to expand a previous small-scale project that involved incorporating computing and sensing technologies into construction sites.

The team plans to expand their work into a unified learning environment easily copied and customized to local conditions.

Construction sites are unique, large and dynamic, with lots of worker choice of actions, O'Brien said. "Complicating it further are the often low education levels of craft workers.

Intelligent job site technologies promise great improvements, but considerable workforce development is needed to speed adoption of these technologies. (c) UPI