“Computational Civil Engineering - "Intersections" International Journal

“Computational Civil Engineering 2005”, International Symposium 35“In the past, you asked friends for an answer, now you ask google”. Apparentlyaccessing computers can prove many times easier than accessing people. That’sjust one of the endorsements asserting artificial intelligence research, morespecifically knowledge bases and expert systems. But it’s also true that there is alot of knowledge inside people, so finding people can prove as important as findingdocuments.Searching for information can be done in many ways. There is a definitive scalefrom a structured search to an unstructured prowl. Restricting to computer aidedactivities, consulting a document management system, looking for a specificdocument, is a very structured way to search. Also structured is using searchengines over the Internet, but among the results there may be other things thatmight make us wander away a bit from the structuredness of pursuit. Coining ideas,discussing in groups, paying attention to other’s can be mostly unstructured, but atleast we will probably find many new, interesting ideas. Browsing throughlibraries, bibliographies, references and links, is even more unstructured. The mostunstructured is probably the serendipity level, namely: making fortunatediscoveries by accident.3. EDUCATION AND INFORMATIONAs technology rapidly changes, the importance of educating and training becomesmore critical for the human society. Young people are more receptive to evolvingmeans and resources due to their higher degree of susceptibility combined with theaxiomatic curiosity of human nature. The first glimpse in sometime amazinglyevolving technology conformance is often made in family environment or school.The adequate use of changing technologies is considered a trivially requirement inhigher education and mostly professional activities.In academic education the traditional teaching format of having an individuallecture to an audience has been supplemented, in some cases even replaced by thedevelopment and implementation of new learning methods, due to the evolution ofinformation technology and multimedia equipment. Conventional lecture formatteaching methods sometimes fall short of conveying the complex analysis anddesign principles that need to be mastered in engineering and structural design.However when the theories are exemplified in a virtual environment withmultimedia presentation, animation, interaction, and manipulated imagevisualization techniques, the conceptual understanding is expected to be enhanced.The important advantages of virtual reality environments over othercomputer-based design tools are that they enable the user to interact throughsimulation in order to conceptualize relations that may not be apparent from a lessdynamic representation, and to visualize models that are difficult to understand in