Ghoreishi Receives $369K NSF Award for AI/ML-Enabled Resilient Building Design
Fatemeh Ghoreishi, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, jointly appointed with the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, has received a $368,688 award from the U.S. National Science Foundation to advance artificial intelligence and machine learning methods for safer, more resilient building design. The award supports her project, “AI-Driven Infrastructure Design for Evacuation Efficiency and Multi-Hazard Resilience under Uncertainty”, through NSF’s Infrastructure Systems and People (ISP) program.
The project addresses a major limitation of current design practice. Hazards, building systems, human behavior, and code requirements are often evaluated separately, even though their interactions can determine whether people evacuate safely during complex emergencies. Ghoreishi’s research will develop an AI-enabled design framework that brings these factors together and evaluates building performance under uncertainty, system degradation, and compound disruptions. The framework will combine design-stage digital twins, uncertainty-aware AI/ML models, and code-constrained optimization to generate portfolios of building and retrofit options rather than a single recommended design. These portfolios will make tradeoffs among safety, resilience, cost, and implementation feasibility transparent, while identifying options that continue to perform when conditions depart from nominal assumptions.
“Meeting code requirements is essential, but it does not always reveal how a building will perform when hazards interact, critical systems degrade, and people must make decisions under stress,” Ghoreishi said. “Our goal is to develop rigorous and transparent AI/ML methods that help engineers and public-safety stakeholders make better-informed design decisions under uncertainty.”