Ep# 4 Entering the Golden Age of Innovation in Construction with René Morkos

Welcome to In The Zone, brought to you by US Construction Zone, bringing you strategies for success with construction innovators and change makers, including In The Zone peer nominated national award winners or your host, Jeremy and Valerie Owens.

Valerie

Valerie Owens. I’m here with Jeremy.

Rene

Hi. Welcome.

Jeremy

Thanks for being here on In the Zone podcast.

Valerie

We have a very exciting guest today, Renee Marcos, who has developed Alice, which is an artificial intelligence for the construction industry. And I’m excited to get to know him.

Jeremy

Yeah, it’s going to be great. It’s going to be way above my pay grade, basically, is what it’s going to be.

Valerie

So as we prepare to talk to Renee, one of the things that we are finding in the construction industry or really any industry globally is that technology has really kind of stuck its foot in the door and is heating up.

Jeremy

Yeah, I would say it’s heating up. It’s obviously here to stay.

But.

Jeremy

There’S so many different things that we could talk about. I think the first one that I wanted to just mention, and we’ll put the link to this article because it’s a great article. It’s just we don’t have enough time to go through it all. It’s article called Construction Technology to Watch in 2021 by Big Rentz. And what’s cool about it is they go through, like, the top ten things they’re seeing. And this first one of augmented reality or virtual reality is so cool because you’re going to be able to put on these goggles and basically walk a construction site finished.

Jeremy

So you’re going to be able to see, oh, this flow doesn’t work. We need to change this. We need to change that. It’s going to help with safety. It’s going to help with making sure that things are built the wrong way. I just had a virtual reality experience the other day at my brother’s house, where I put one of those things on for the first time. And it was a thing where we go on a plank and you jump off basically into nothingness. And I fell.

Jeremy

I fully knew I was in virtual reality, but apparently my body didn’t know that. So I think just coming off that experience I had a couple of weeks ago.

Valerie

I’m like, wow, that would be so cool to walk a construction site before it’s done right to make changes based on what you see and what a gift to be able to offer clients.

Yeah.

Jeremy

Like, here’s a finish to come into my office here, maybe hold someone’s hand and don’t jump out of the window.

Valerie

Lots of times, I think on a smaller scale, we have just individual customers. And then on a large scale, you have those multi million dollar projects. Sorry, but some of the frustration, I think lies in not being able to imagine what it will look like when it’s completed. I know, at least for me, as a homeowner. So how nice to be able to when those frustrations begin to say, hey, we’ve got this. Come join our little world here.

Jeremy

Put these on

Jeremy

You owe me $1 million.

Valerie

Vr obviously is going to be huge as we move forward with technology. What other things?

Jeremy

I mean, obviously there’s a ton of them. The robots will be huge, not only mainly in the pre construction to start. So building things before they get to the job site, but even robots on sites now that are going to be helping lift and carry and do some of the manual things that are tougher for humans. So that would be cool to see. And then drones we’ve talked about on previous podcast with Tony Raider and what they’re using for roofs. And we’re seeing that from a siding and windows perspective, where we don’t even have to go to homes all the time.

Jeremy

We can have the measurements sent to us that’s going to be really cool and efficient. And then the artificial intelligence and machine learning is what our guest Rene is going to be talking about. So I’ll let him do the explaining because I have no idea. Still don’t. So that’s going to be great. And then there’s so many modular construction.

Rene

It’s just.

Jeremy

In California, we have so many modulars now because the cost of building is so high that even after all these fires we’ve had, people are not building back with regular construction. They’re going with a modular home, and they look great now, and they’re way more efficient and way less cost. So some homeowners are like, I can’t afford that $800,000 home. Now I’m going to have to build the modular, and it still looks great. But that’s going to be kind of a cool wave to see where that goes as well.

Valerie

Some other things that they mentioned that you’ve probably seen on a smaller scale are 3D printing, building information modeling, which is like creating the digital representation of what a finished project would look like or really the entire process of building a good friend of mine, my friend Carrie had sent me something when I was going through a tough kind of question in my life, and she had sent me this thing that said, we have to I can’t remember it exactly, but it says something to the effect of we have to rewrite the idea that new or change is something to fear.

Valerie

And I just really like that. It sounds simplistic, but it actually is very true. Sometimes we look at things like AI or robots or 3D printing, and it’s different than what we’ve experienced before. But yet there’s a beautiful world out there that’s just waiting to be moved into. If we can let go of what has been done and move into what will be done.

Jeremy

Yeah, I think the ones that adopt the technology where you can, obviously, these aren’t cheap, so it’s not like everyone’s going to be buying a robot tomorrow. I’d love to clean our house, but those that can adopt, these things are going to be winning. I mean, obviously, we have an aging construction industry, so as they retire, then the new generation is going to be responsible for carrying the torch and saying, hey, we need to do it this way, and we need to listen to them because I don’t have all the answers.

Jeremy

But I know everything that we’ve had. Technology side to our business has always been a good thing and always been more efficient. So it’ll be fun to talk to Rene and get his insight on what he’s doing at Alice Technologies.

Rene

All right.

Jeremy

So now onto our guest. Special guest Renee Morcos is founder and inventor of the world’s first artificial intelligence software application to optimize construction called Alice Technologies. He is second generation civil engineer with over 15 years of construction industry experience that is divided between industry and academia. His professional experience includes working as a project manager in Afghanistan, underwater pipeline construction, automation engineering, ERP systems limitations professor at Stanford University and various virtual design and construction projects. Please help me welcome Renee Marcos.

Rene

Good morning. Great.

Jeremy

Thanks for being here.

Rene

Yeah. Thanks for inviting me.

Yeah.

Jeremy

So with me, I’d like to get started because I am a third generation in remodeling myself. So I’m always fascinated to hear one’s upbringing their story. I know you’re a second generation. So tell me a little bit about your childhood and about how that experience kind of molded you into who you are today.

Rene

Yeah, for sure. When I graduated high school, my dad gave me a good piece of advice. Look son do anything you want. Just don’t do civil engineering. I was like, all right. I know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, right? I was confused before this, but now it’s clear my parents escaped Communism. We ended up in Beirut, unfortunately, during the war, and so I got to see a very destructive side of our species. But I think that for me, reconstruction and the ability to build was something that was important.

Rene

I think that’s one part of the reason why I went to Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, you get to experience the kind of golden era of civil engineering, if you will. The late 1800s hundreds, early, 1900s hundreds. Right. When civil engineering was kind of this really cutting edge field, people just figuring it out and the Eiffel Tower was getting built, bridges were being built. People start to understand how to build large, complex structures instead of in Afghanistan. You really get to push back nature in some ways and build critical infrastructure.

Rene

We built the first window doors factory in the country. We built mostly basis for security, which I think a lot of people are watching the news and kind of see how that’s important, right? Yeah. I repaired an RPG attack on the runway on the airport, which was 25% of the airport’s capacity 33%. I should be precise. So, yeah, I got to experience a lot of really fun stuff. I like to build stuff like that always just jazzed me, right. I remember driving with my dad and he or even my mom.

Rene

He would point out like, hey, I built that or I built that. And I was like, hey, it’s kind of cool. Like that Villa, that structure, that office, whatever that was. It was small projects. He was a small time contractor. But I was like, that’s going to be there, and he won’t. And I thought that was really cool. The idea that you go and pour concrete and you go home that day for me when we poured concrete, the fact that something is there that wasn’t there before and it’s big.

Rene

It’s going to be there for a long time like that. Until now. I think it’s just really cool. That’s simple. That is cool.

Valerie

Why did he not want you to go into that field?

Rene

Oh, yeah. It’s a good question. I think it’s for the same reason. And that kind of ties into one of the reasons we founded Alice, right? I think that he saw that the job was really stressful, right? It’s got a lot of hours, and it’s not one of the best paying jobs. And so he was like, lots of stress, lots of responsibility. You’re not close to the honeypot. Maybe you should be an investment banker, right? I think that’s kind of the thing that’s changing right now, right?

Rene

2017 is what I call the Renaissance of construction, right? The 2017 was when all this cash got poured into it. Right. The numbers 6.4 billion since 2014. I was looking at Construction Insights. 2017 was when it sort of ticked up. There’s kind of a jump. But if you look at the Katara investment, there’s almost 2 billion. If I remember correctly, right. Without the investment, it was hovering somewhere around the billion that year alone. And that’s kind of what I think the world woke up to.

Rene

Oh, my God. This is going to be the next wave of a cool shit that’s going to happen, right? Like, this is going to be it my dad. I think the time gave me the advice that he’s all right. Which is he didn’t see it as a field that was cutting edge. He didn’t see it as a field that was innovating. That was growing. That was kind of vibrant. And it was highly stressful. The thing that if you look at construction folks, we tend to work really long hours, right?

Rene

Yeah. compare to a contrasting person, it is regular that you are in the office. I used to 08:00 p.m.. 07:00 p.m. Especially when some things are going sideways, some delay, something to be caught, caught up to accelerate or something like that. Very typical. So that really was one of the reasons for founding Alice, which was we wanted to bring the cutting edge technology during the research and the PhD. I basically converted construction into an algorithmic problem. Right. The reason that’s significant is that you can suddenly unlock 30 years of research from computer science, from operations research, from math and science and engineering, from industrial.

Rene

Suddenly all of that stuff becomes applicable. Right. And I thought that was a worthwhile thing to do because it really transforms the industry into a modern industry. And I think it’s happening. It’s not just Alice. There’s other companies that I’m sure have been on this podcast. Right. Working exactly. Yeah.

Valerie

So I want to ask you, I love your perspective. It’s interesting hearing you explain it after reading some of your past interviews. But hearing it come from you, it’s so illuminated how you have taken what could be seen as just a trade and really taken your education and combined it with that and made it into this Renaissance esque movement. And so I want to ask before we get into talking about Alice, how has your education and tell us about it. But how has your education changed your future in this industry?

Rene

That’s a great question. You know, my dad had a PhD, and Interestingly enough, because we had to escape the war in Beirut. He didn’t get to you. He was a professor at a University, right. Working for Hello. Yeah. He was a professor at the University. And he was working for a large sort of contract, one of the largest in the country. When we escaped the war, he kind of lost the professorship. He didn’t end up working kind of closely in the field. He ended up founding a number of companies that did retail and the small time contract and stuff like that.

Rene

But I saw, like, he told me that the thing that the PhD gave him was a way of thinking. And so for me, I remember when I said, hey, I want to go do a PhD. Every person I talked to, that’s the dumbest thing. Why would you like construction – yea if you were in biotech? We get it. If you were in physics. Yeah, we get it. People gave me all these examples. But construction management, like, no. Right. And to your point, I’m really proud of it. I’m really proud of the fact that I think construction scheduling and optimization is the coolest thing in the world.

Rene

Yeah. And truthfully, if you look at the problem that we’re solving, it is we solve the hardest operational problems in the world. If you are building like I was building a $350,000,000 gas refinery, you’re burning through 1.61 $.8 million a day. Yeah. Think about that. That’s the capital that you’re burning through. You’ve got 6000 people on site, every single one of those people doing something, everything. One of those people’s moving equipment, labor, 2 million documents that are basically shuffled, ordered, verified, versioned, all of that stuff.

Rene

Right. So the size of these problems is incredibly large. That is why we haven’t been able to digitize it. The other stuff, the stuff that was easier got on that digitization block sooner. And so that’s a question of how the education came into it. You’ve really got to hand it to Silicon Valley and Stanford, which is a study that Scifi Center for Integrated Civil Engineering. Anybody listening? You should check it out. https://cife.stanford.edu/. One of the oldest research institutes in the country for construction management.

Rene

It’s by studying there and them pushing me to kind of like, keep pushing the bleeding edge, pushing the bleeding edge, pushing the bleeding edge. And then using a lot of the knowledge that was in that institution from the folks that came before me because I built my PhD on top of four other PhD. I built this, combined them and built this layer on top. But to answer the question, it was undoubtedly education. It was undoubtedly the education that sort of put me in that position. That’s not uncommon.

Rene

If you look at Obama, he went to Harvard. If you look at Condoleezza Rice, she went to Stanford. If you look at there is a higher chance that these institutions are going to push you to go do something big. Right. And so answer your question, like, sure, I can say that I work hard. I used to clock 20 hours days. Right. But, yeah, it’s the education, right. And it’s funny, like, so many people when I said, hey, I’m going to go do a PhD in construction, it was like, oh, that’s dumb.

Rene

Right. But it turns out that you can do some cool stuff in it. And I did this thing called an industrial PhD, which is you do six months on six months off. Anyone that’s listening. That’s really cool, because I was like, if anything is going to make you sleep, it’s five years of school. Right? True. I was like, I’m going to lose all my business knowledge. If I sit in a lab for five years, I won’t know how to talk to people. I won’t know how to negotiate, lose all those skills.

Rene

I remember telling my advisor I said, hey, I want to do six months on six months off. And the beautiful thing about Stanford is like, I think most of the places would be like, what the heck? No, you’re an academic -that’s it. Where as Stanford was like cool. It’s going to probably take you twice long. And it didn’t. Right.

Rene

Six months.

Rene

I’d go and consult for this company in the Netherlands. And it was really cool because I got to start consulting. Like, I go back to Stanford, learn the toys, learn the bin, learn the 3D, the 4D, the energy calculation, bring it back, work a regular job, work my regular 40 hours a week job because I figured they weren’t going to pay for research. But then in the evenings, I could start putting my own stuff. Right? Yeah. So this kind of back and forth between because I was doing them three month rotations.

Rene

So this back and forth between the research institution and practice is what led to what we have today. And I ended up complaining on the PhD in six years, which is average. Awesome.

Jeremy

So with all that world travel and even in between academia, I guess how has that helped you today now that everything’s global, right? Especially what you do. You’re global.

Rene

Right.

Jeremy

So for me, I’m so used to just local construction, but with what you do, it’s global. So you traveling all those places. How has that helped you?

Rene

It’s funny. It’s like Steve Job’s said in that speech, everything makes sense when you look back. But the first thing is that I would cut class and go building, right? I literally was like, Man, I hate the structural engineering. It’s driving up the wall. It’s boring. I would pick the coolest construction projects in the city, right? I would knock on the door, and I’d be like, hey, do you guys need any help? You’re 17, kid, get off my construction site. And I’m like, no, what if I work for free?

Rene

They’d be like, Huh? And I’m like, no, I swear, I’ll work for free. And so they’d be like, and I tell them I was studying at this University and civil engineering. They’re like, okay, kids. Cute. We’ll let him stay. Most of them, I think, figured that I’d be there for a couple of days and quit. But I do full 30 days. And I would waltz to the PM’s office, and I’d be like, hey, you want to give me some beer money? They give me 100 or $200 for the month of work.

Rene

I picked up a lot of experience. I guess the pattern there is as long as you’re doing something in the field, it somehow ends up being useful at some point. And so to me, because I had worked on three, four projects before I graduated. And then I went to Afghanistan, which everybody thought was crazy. But those projects have 100% profit Mark. So you can afford to have a 23 year old kid with 100 people managing five projects. I was like, okay, so I’m not just literally designing building operations.

Rene

I was like, the master builder architect. All of these. What I’m trying to explain is that later, the key insight was I was like, everyone’s like, oh, construction can’t be simplified into some generalized rule set. It can’t be done right. And the thing is, when you look at every other field, right? It’s like every other field has gone through the exact same thing. Somebody was like, no, I can simplify it into some generalized rules that I can digitize it. I can automate it. I can standardize it.

Rene

Right. And lots of people were like, now it can be done. It’s too complicated. Factory. It’s too complicated. Right? But to me, I was like, the one thing I know is that a concrete column is a concrete column. I’ve poured them in Beirut and Afghanistan and Prague and us. There’s one way to do it. I swear to God, it doesn’t matter if you’re Bangladesh or Berlin. Right? Put up a steel cage, you put the formwork, you pour it, you wait for it to dry, you remove the former.

Rene

It’s literally that is it. That’s a question. Like the fact that I had done all these little odd jobs, right? Like, by the time I started my PhD, I had probably 12-15 projects that I had really actively worked on, managed and so on. Right. To answer the question. I think what it did was it kind of led me to see that.

Rene

Hey.

Rene

There’s a lot more standardization than people think. And it’s funny when I started my PD, I was like, I think there’s a lot more standardization than people think. I didn’t know you could standardize everything. By the time I think the PhD. I. Was like, Holy cow. Look what I did.

Jeremy

It’s funny. Like how many times people said, You’re crazy? It kind of seems like every time someone says you’re crazy, don’t do it. You should probably do it. It’s not going against the flow, right?

Rene

The thing I can tell you is it’s funny, like, even till today, that doesn’t happen about six months. But even eight months, I have people tell me it’s not possible. We did it. Look at it. It’s right here. Run it, try it, test it. I swear, I got it. It knows how to build. You can literally set up any project, put it in there, and it will build it 600 million different ways for you. What do you mean? So that’s the question. The one thing I would advise anyone to do is if you are doing here’s what I’ve learned if you’re doing something and everybody’s like, oh, yeah, that’s a great idea.

Rene

You’re not really squeezing all the potential out, right? To answer a point. If you’re doing something and every single person you know without fail is like, hey, man, this is the dumbest thing I’ve heard. Maybe think about it. If you want to go jump off a cliff, everybody knows, like, no, you’re going to kill yourself. Do not do that.

Jeremy

Right.

Rene

But for me, for example, it has been challenging to build this. And so sometimes when I’m kind of tired, I’ll listen to some Pep talks from some big entrepreneurs. And I remember looking at Elon Musk because one of the things I was trying to figure out is why is this darn things so hard, like a vent of Afghanistan climb mountains? Why is this thing just beating the hell out of me? And I think Elon said entrepreneurship is like chewing broken glass and staring into the abyss. And I was like, oh, that’s exactly what it was like.

Rene

His point was that the reason it’s so painful is that every time you think of the company dying, it’s like you’re dying. Your limbic system kind of kicks in and you have this sort of survival kind of reaction to it. I was like, yeah, that completely makes sense. But the thing that he said that was interesting was that if you want to achieve something large, you’ve got to stick to it for a long time and it’s going to suck for a long time. People are going to think that it’s going to fail.

Rene

The thing that he said that I thought was useful, at least to me, was, do you ultimately believe that? Does it make sense? Right. So from his perspective, he’s like, building spaceships. And it was like, if you get the Darn thing to work and it’s actually up there spinning around the planet, is that worth a lot of money? Are people going to pay you and is it going to have a big impact that fundamentally is true, right with us. Do you fundamentally believe the macro pieces of the puzzle?

Rene

Right. I would always come back to this right at like, three in the morning when I was like, nauseous, right. It was like, Is somebody somewhere going to figure this out? Yes. Like, you cannot tell me that we’re going to be managing construction using PDF, print out and CPM scheduling 50 years from now. Right. Somebody somewhere is going to figure out how to optimize Darn thing.

Jeremy

Did you do was going to be you?

Rene

No, actually. And truthfully, the problem was way too big to tackle it once. I didn’t set out to solve it in the beginning, the way it worked was I set out to solve a much smaller piece of the puzzle. I set out to solve space equalization. That was the thing we’re building the cruise ship terminals in Amsterdam. I was doing this in the six months that I was raising money for the PhD. Basically also useful thing in that industrial industrial PhD. You raise money, you’re in six months, use it to pay for your program graduate with no debt.

Rene

Kind of a nice idea. Yeah. Especially with the educational costs in the US, which are off the charts. Yeah. That’s kind of nuts. I was on the project six weeks late, right. For the structural steel or the steel and the foundation that’s six weeks late. The sole is basically dining a system table going. I can’t work any faster. I can’t work any faster. And €50,000 of liquid damages per day. You can imagine anybody in construction has been there, right? Yeah. You walk into the project and it’s a hairball and you’re realizing like, oh, crap.

Rene

It’s not one critical path. It’s five or six or, heaven forbid, like, ten. Right. And so you’re like, now what? And you’re starting to realize like, oh, and I’ve been there. You kind of start to Peel the onion and you realize, oh, no, we’re not in this much trouble. We’re actually in this much. And that’s one of the reasons we invented Alice right from the beginning. The software has to be nuclear proof. It is not vapor. It’s not a photo sharing app. We are building something solid and what we would go to our clients, we would say, hey, we fixed this little piece.

Rene

I know what your job is like. You got 50 balls in the air and they’re complicated. You’re betting your career, your family’s wellbeing, company’s. Wellbeing, employees. Well being all of that on this project, succeeding. When you go to Alice, if we told you we saw this little piece, you can sleep soundly that piece of solved. There’s a lot of other pieces that we haven’t solved, but that piece piece is done on that project. €50,000 per day. These guys are yelling, so I got up, looked out of the window, and I saw 100,000 square foot of space, six people standing to a point of like, oh, it makes sense later.

Rene

Like, I was 26, but I had already been on 16 projects, 20 projects and all that. And I realized that’s where me working for free. All my friends were like, hey, that’s stupid. Why are you working for free? Like, you should.

Jeremy

There it is again.

Rene

Hanging out on the beach and drinking beer, which is a fun pastime. Right. Suddenly, because I had been on all these construction projects, I could pattern that. Right. That’s kind of interesting. Like that in itself. It’s like, oh, I was like, hey, every project I’ve ever been on is empty. Think about that. Literally. Pick a drive down the road, look at a project. It’s never crawling with people. It’s a pocket of maybe one or two pockets of work, all this empty space just sitting there, right? And literally, it hit me like a lead brick.

Rene

I was like, wait a minute. Like, it snapped the photo and that photo motivated the research site was like, hey, well, our construction project is really empty. I think so. Like, everyone I’ve been on feels that way. I got to remember, in Afghanistan, my boss would come to the office and come to the site. And I remember thinking, like, I have 63 people out there, but it doesn’t look like we’re doing anything. I wonder if he’s going to be upset, like, hey, why aren’t you guys working any faster?

Rene

And like, he walked through the site and he didn’t say anything. I was like, oh, I guess this is what construction projects look like. Right? Right. But I started measuring, right. We took a camera. That’s a cool thing about doing a PhD. You get to tinker with stuff. It’s really fascinating. A lot of people are like, Why do it? I’m like, it’s like, the only time in the world where your brain belongs to only you. Wow. Good way of saying. Yeah, very cool. You’re earning 24,000 a year.

Rene

You have no money, right? But you wake up in the morning, you’re like, what do I want to think about today? And you flip through stuff. And to me it was like, super fun. Right? Like, valid reading, lean construction planning, Toyota construction production system Ford production system, reading all of these great minds that have gone through and, like, figured all of these operations, research stuff and really kind of get to sit there and pontificate on it. Yeah.

Jeremy

Brings up probably the number one question you get all the time is the question about AI for me in my brain, it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around an industry that I’ve been around my whole life and it’s just ever changing, right? We have Covid. We have supply chain issues everywhere we turn, there’s a new challenge, a new hurdle. How have you guys at Alice? And maybe kind of roll this into describing what Alice does for the construction worker is how does that work when it’s changing every minute of every day?

Rene

How does Alice help with that change? Is the question, yeah.

Jeremy

And maybe not only how does it help, but how does it work with it changing so often and maybe even going back to what we’ve been through with Covid and now supply chain and some of the challenges we have when you’re scheduling a project out. Things now changed, right? We used to get things in X amount of time, and now it’s quadruple that. So how does that work with Alice?

Rene

The thing that we did with Alice. And this is the part that’s kind of remarkable. Alice understands how to build stuff. So think about that. Alice knows what a crane is. Alice knows what a crew is. Alice knows what overtime is. Alice understands what production rate is. Alice is a generative simulator. Generative means that she goes through lots and lots of parameters. Those are lots of different ways. Lots of sequences. Adds a crane removes the crane, etc., etc. And simulate it.  She actually moves resources around, shuffles up to space and time to build your object.

Rene

Right. And so the way that we did that is we separated planning from scheduling. As we’ve learned. It’s actually planning from simulating planning and setting up the rules. So the reason I sort of explain all that is that once you set up the rule set, Alice has built your project for you. That’s the key difference, right? Like, Alice now knows your project. But if you go to Alice and say, hey, this material got delayed, she simply rebuilds it with the delay. You can tell Alice, hey, rebuild it with the delay.

Rene

And then you can say, resequence around that delay. You can say, try overtime to mitigate for the delay. Try overtime for steel workers in the month of October. Try month of September. Try both months. Try add some steel crews. Try remove steel crews. Try add a crane. Try like Sky’s the limit. You literally can change that parameter. And resimilate it. That’s the thing we have. Wow.

Jeremy

And I know you’ve gotten this one, too, is, how would you define AI for your business? Because I know AI probably what has 50 different definitions. And it really probably. Maybe you need about ten different definitions.

Rene

Right. That’s fine.

Jeremy

So I guess how would you define it for Alice?

Rene

Yeah. I think that here’s a piece of advice to anyone listening, right. If somebody starts giving you Flack about AI, smile and say, Well, why don’t you define artificial? And why don’t you define intelligence? Let’s start there. Right. And so they’re not easy to do. The formal definition given by McCarthy, who started a Professor, I think in the 60s when he coined the term was like computer solving problems that humans can solve. Right. A vague definition. There are several different ways to define it right. One way to define it is what technique are you using.

Rene

Is it a search algorithm and neural net, multilayer neural net and so on and so forth. That’s been in Vogue or in fashion lately. I think maybe three or four years ago, neural nets were the big thing, right? Neural nets, if I was to kind of explain. And I’m not sure what’s going on there, here’s a question. What makes a three? A three? You know, it’s a three. Somebody writes a three. Right. You know, it kind of arches. But how do you teach a computer that one way to do it is to say, Well, I’m going to tell the computer that there’s an arch and it goes at this angle and it rotates by this much, it comes back down and it could be sideways that’s tilted all these different rules.

Rene

That’s one way. The other way to do it is to basically feed it through, like, this kind of randomized system. Right. And so the way it works is that you’ve got pixels on the screen and each of those pixels is either one or zero. Right. And so based on that, the computer has this function where it looks at those pixels. And it has a database of threes. The kind of pattern matches, if that makes sense, not getting into too much detail into how exactly that works.

Rene

But the way you’ll notice with neural nets is that there’s always a percentage of how good your algorithm. So you’ll give it a database of 10,000 threes. The computer’s like, oh, I can now tell you what a three is with 90% accuracy, with 85%. So those are always kind of numbers around your own. So three, four years ago, that was kind of the big thing. Everyone was like, oh, AI is neural nets. Reason is because as you update the database of threes, that function of how it interprets three starts to change.

Rene

I don’t tend to like that definition too much because your own nets were cool three, four years ago. Now they call them machine learning. Right. And there’s going to be something else down the line right now. The definition of how does it work? Does it learn from the data that it’s looking at? So does the fundamental algorithm change? Yeah. That’s a good definition.

Right.

Rene

And so is the algorithm changing itself from the day feeding it, right? Yeah. The third one is, what does the software understand if it’s artificial intelligence, what concept does it understand? Chess. Ai would understand what a Rook is. Right. Whereas Alice understands what a crane, a crew production rate, et cetera. Right. Three definitions right there. The last one is kind of a little more. Wishywashy is like, what can it do that we couldn’t do before so it can generate 600 million scheduling options. Right. Those are sort of four definitions.

Rene

Yeah. I tend to find that I haven’t worked in the field like, hey, guys, they’re algorithms. Okay. Nothing out there that is going to wake up and doesn’t happen. And there’s a lot of smart people working on making those algorithms better and better and better. Right? Yeah. Full stop, right? Yeah. The one thing I heard is AI is whatever the latest thing that computers can do that we haven’t been able to do thus far because suddenly AI was natural language processing cars. Ai is the latest thing that we couldn’t do before, right.

Rene

Unfortunately, we have AI in the name of the company. Alice is Macron artificial intelligence. I think it’s become a little bit overused. People slap AI in the box for absolutely everything. Right. Right. But yeah, I wouldn’t be too concerned, right? In the sense that lots of people have lots of different definitions.

Right.

Rene

And sure, they’re all right.

Jeremy

That makes sense.

Valerie

I love that you’ve taken, though, something that Jeremy was saying that the industry is always changing, and in some ways, it is just based on some variables that we always have because we’re human beings. But I love that you’ve taken something that really hasn’t been changed in a long time and just made something that you can see. Looking into the future is going to be used without question. So looking into the future now picturing that Alice is being used across the world. What is the legacy that you would like to leave?

Valerie

Is it Alice? Is it growing even bigger? Your site set higher when you think your legacy, what do you want to leave behind?

Rene

I’ll give you maybe a poetic twist to it. I’d like that by the time my kids grow up and I’ll have some to be able to say, hey, the one thing you should do is construction in the sense that, hey, this is the field that’s now cutting edge and bleeding edge and lots of exciting things are happening. Lots, lots of tech and innovation, so on and so forth. Right. Kind of interesting that people tend to view, like, all this change is like, oh, I’m scared. Like, what an incredible opportunity.

Rene

Like, Holy cow. Right. What’s happening in construction today is what happened to manufacturing in the 80s. If you look back historically, if you look at factories, I know my grandmother in Europe, factories were shitty places to work. People would be in a production line, screwing bolts for 16 hours a day with not much light. And it was not a great place to work. And today, when you think of manufacturing, it’s become as high tech and high tech industry. And that’s happening in construction. It’s an incredible opportunity.

Rene

So to answer the question. I want to leave behind a field that is more capable of being a cutting edge, high tech, research focused field. Yeah.

Jeremy

That makes sense. Renee. We know you spent some time with us. We really appreciate it. We want to end on a couple of just fun things, and we call it the zone out little session where we kind of peek behind the curtain a little bit. And I know you kind of answered this a little bit, but our question, number one, is as a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? So I guess this would be before the civil engineering came into play when you were playing around as a kid.

Jeremy

What did you want to be?

Rene

That’s a good question. I want to be a lawyer at one point. So thank God that didn’t happen. Yeah. I think the law was a big one at one point. Physicist? Yeah. Okay. Quantum mechanics. But as a physicist, you get to sit in a lab and you don’t get to be out there and, like, do stuff, right? It’s just a lot of lab work. Yeah.

Totally.

Valerie

That’s so fascinating. If you had your own talk show, who would you want to be your first guest.

Rene

From the past, I would have liked to talk to Eiffel. Okay. I just asked him how he thought about building that darn thing about my facts, right? He sort of said, hey, I’ll fund it. But then I’m going to charge people tickets to go up it. And the city said, sure, but when they’re building it, people must have thought it’s the dumbest thing in the world. Like, why? How much steel are they going to use for that?

Jeremy

Well, you need people like that, right?

Rene

Yeah.

Jeremy

And the last one is, who is the most influential person in your life?

Rene

Oh, most influential person. Well. There’s two. I had two advisors at Stanford, Professor Martin Fisher and Dr. John Koons. Those two really between the two of them pushed me beyond the edge, right? They consistently failed me. That was the one thing that they did really well. So I have to redo it until they finally approved. Yeah.

Jeremy

Well, Renee, we really appreciate your time. We know what you’re doing is great. We appreciate you pushing the limits to innovation in construction. We need people like you, and it’s just fun to be kind of on the cusp of something really cool. And so we appreciate your time. And we wish you much success at Alice Technologies. Thanks so much.

Rene

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, right. And we need people like you so really excited. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye.

Valerie

Bye. The people that we interview and talk with. We have limited time. And so I’m constantly looking at the clock going, it was a little bit longer. A little bit longer.

Rene

Yeah. For sure.

Valerie

I feel like with him, what’s so unique about a person like that is you have somebody who has been in the construction industry on the actual active side of it as a career and a job, but is also a lifelong learner and doesn’t ever want to stop at just whatever is happening in his day to day. How can I improve this? How can I make this more efficient, more cost effective? And so they’re looking. I feel very inspired right now, the way that he yeah.

Jeremy

I wish you could go build Alice, but you can’t.

Valerie

Really thankful that we have people like that. And it is great. It’s great to talk to people like that. They’re just a different type of way of thinking. Everybody has different skills, and his is just yeah.

Jeremy

It’s hard to understand and grasp it all. But I think the thing that I love the most is that he loves what he does, and I can relate to that and what I’m doing. But it’s just like a person that man, he loves to talk about it. I can tell that he would talk about it all day every day because he’s proud of it.

Rene

He should be.

Jeremy

But he also loves what he does. He did the right thing. He went into the right field at the right time, and I think that’s rare. I think a lot of people fall into something that they don’t love. He fell into something that he loves and because he loves it, he’s going to make some great things.

Valerie

Oh, my gosh.

Rene

Yeah.

Valerie

Everybody in the industry will benefit from it.

Yeah.

Jeremy

So that was my favorite part is just being kind of like, oh, man, he loves this. He loves this stuff.

Yes.

Jeremy

And that’s cool. And also left me with a little bit of hope. I’ve been down the last few weeks with labor shortage and with everything that’s going on from a stress standpoint. But then you look at this and you’re like, okay, this is going to replace not necessarily people, but make us more efficient. And it’s not going to replace people. That’s why I keep wanting to make sure people are clear with it’s just going to change what we have to do instead of being on a job site with that many workers.

Jeremy

Now we’re going to have to manage maybe the robot part of life and some of the other things that are going to be making our lives more efficient. We’re going to have to manage those. So it’s not going to replace people. It’s just going to make our jobs heck of a lot easier.

Yeah.

Valerie

I’d love to before we kind of go off his final answer. So the answer to who is the most influential person.

And.

Valerie

I love what he has kind of the truth behind his answer. And I think that when he was talking about his professors, I love that he said because they failed him so often. And that is how we grow. And I think we oftentimes, especially in construction. And for those who are new as an entrepreneur or starting your own business, or when you get a customer that just drags you down, can feel like I’m in the wrong business. Whoever thought I could do this. The fact is that growth comes from mistakes and growth comes from failure.

Valerie

And as long as you don’t stop and as long as you like, you said, when you’re down, that you just keep going. I know that’s cliche and easier said than done. But I love that someone who has achieved something so industry changing can say that the people who have influenced him the most are the ones who also didn’t let him get by with going like, hey, you’re great all the time. Everything you put out is perfect. They actually forced him to.

Speaker 4

Get better.

Valerie

Yeah, get better and better.

Jeremy

And he said, these are the two people who challenged him the most right. And I think we struggle with that as humans is that we want to make everybody like us. But for a professor and someone like that, that’s not their job. Their job is to challenge you and make you better. And I mean, think about it just being parents like we’re not there to be their buddy. We are there to challenge them and make them better. And hopefully they’ll be better than us. And that’s what’s cool.

Jeremy

He immediately said, it’s these two guys and not that they were probably the most enjoyable people for him to be around. It was because they helped mold him into who he is today. Very cool, very cool stuff. We had a great time, Renee. And thank you so much for listening to In the Zone podcast. I have been Jeremy. I still am Jeremy and Valerie. We’ll see you next time.

Speaker 4

You’ve been listening to in the Zone with Jeremy and Valerie OLS. Be sure to subscribe to in the Zone and stay in the know with the best minds in the construction industry to nominate an innovator or Changemaker in the construction industry, connect with your management peers and stay up to date with construction industry free news. Be sure to visit usconstructionzone. Com.

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