Leveraging social media platforms and generative AI technologies for construction industry applications

Social media platforms and generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are revolutionary creations of the modern age that have transformed the way people communicate, generate, and disseminate information, and develop creative content. While social media platforms place their primary emphasis on user-generated content, connections, and engagement, generative AI technologies play a pivotal role in driving automation, personalization, content creation, and interactive experiences. Both of these technologies have been leveraged to advance different domains such as healthcare, education, journalism, marketing, and finance, among others. Despite having much promise and numerous applications across domains, the construction industry is yet to strategically leverage the power of these technologies and platforms to advance the industry. This dissertation is focused on leveraging YouTube, a social medial platform, and ChatGPT, a generative AI technology in the following three areas within the context of the construction industry: (1) construction hazard prevention through design (CHPtD), (2) knowledge and information creation during the COVID-19 emergency, and (3) construction hazard recognition and safety education. The first study of this dissertation examined if YouTube can potentially be leveraged to aid construction hazard prevention through design (CHPtD) efforts. CHPtD is largely recognized as one of the most promising strategies for injury prevention in construction workplaces. The effort focuses on identifying, eliminating, and managing construction hazards during the design phase of projects. Despite the recognized value of CHPtD in theory, its practical benefits have largely gone unrealized due to a number of challenges. Among others, one of the major challenges is that design professionals are largely unfamiliar with common construction means and methods and related safety hazards. This practical challenge impedes their ability to foresee potential hazards that can emerge in the field as a result of their design decisions. Because YouTube hosts countless videos that showcase various construction operations (e. g. , skylight installation, excavation, crane rigging, and lifting, etc. ) and related safety hazards (e. g. , fall potential from rooftop, overhead energized powerlines, etc. ), the investigation examined if YouTube can aid with hazard recognition in the context of CHPtD. The study findings demonstrated that YouTube can indeed be strategically leveraged to aid CHPtD efforts and can be strategically adopted in the classroom setting for construction safety education and training. The second study focused on examining if YouTube can serve as a potential source of information for the construction industry in the context of the COVID-19 emergency. The COVID19 pandemic has been one of the most significant emergencies in recent decades. The emergency disrupted many industries including the construction industry. During such emergencies, creating, gathering, synthesizing, and disseminating information is crucial. The study objective was achieved by systematically extracting and distilling the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic as it relates to the construction industry from the content shared via YouTube by leveraging Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling algorithm. The investigation also compared the timeline with which relevant content was shared via YouTube and peer-reviewed research articles to make relative assessments. The findings suggest that YouTube offered significant, relevant, and early coverage across six topics that include health and safety challenges, ongoing construction operation updates, workforce-related challenges, industry operations-related guidelines and advocacy, and others.