Abstract:

The Geotechnical Engineering Office (GEO) of the Civil Engineering and Development Department has leveraged the rapid advancement in innovation and technology to establish a data-driven and resilience-based geotechnical system with a view to withstanding the evident adverse impacts of climate change on slope safety and facilitating future development in Hong Kong. This keynote illustrates the advancement of the geotechnical system through mastering the cutting-edge innovation and technology in four projects, highlighting the opportunities and challenges in attempting to strengthen city’s resilience against extreme weather and facilitate infrastructure development. These include early landslip warning, construction material testing, ground modelling and digital knowledge services. The GEO’s fifth-generation AI-empowered landslip warning system applies multivariate machine-learning models on big data of rainfall, landslide and slope records to achieve significant improvement in forward landslide prediction and support timely issuance of landslip warnings. To facilitate city development, an automated system for concrete cube testing integrating robotics, AI-based image recognition and fracture-pattern classification is developed, which improves the reliability, efficiency and occupational safety of the work process. At a city level, an AI-assisted three-dimensional geological modelling (3DGM), utilizing cutting-edge generative models to infer stratigraphy in areas with limited ground investigation data, has been established. It provides uncertainty-aware ground models for early-stage project planning. Lastly, a pilot large-language-model (LLM) based chatbot using retrieval-augmented generation on geotechnical publications and guidance offers multilingual, citation-backed responses to complex technical enquiries, providing a foundation for long-term AI knowledge services.