Topic: AI and Concrete; Speaker: Ryan Henkensiefken, Concrete.ai

Ryan is a professional engineer with a background in low-carbon concrete design having led teams that focused on concrete design, engineering, business development, and sales within the ready-mix concrete industry. Concrete.ai has developed a novel approach for concrete design by utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize mix designs for a lower global warming potential or a reduced cost. Ryan's focus at Concrete.ai is to help implement their AI-assisted software with concrete producers and building owners to help them reduce the carbon footprint of concrete products to meet carbon reduction commitments while maintaining competitiveness in the market.

The dynamic nature of the ready-mix industry; constant raw material price changes, raw material availability, thousands of mixes with unique characteristics, massive amounts of disconnected data from multiple sources creates interesting challenges for producers to manage their mix designs. Artificial intelligence (AI) assisted design provides a unique opportunity to manage these challenges by doing what AI does best – to take enormously, complex data and process it in real-time – with the best of what experienced engineers and concrete professionals offer – human judgement and experience – creating a new pathway to optimized mix designs. 

Learning Objectives

1.       Learn about an emerging technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and the use of machine learning (ML) to predict the performance of concrete.

2.       Hear about the challenges facing mix design professionals and an AI assisted methodology for mix optimization to help with these challenges.

3.       Hear about updates about the new ACI committee 135 Machine Learning-Informed Construction and Design