Our capabilities of both generating and collecting engineering data have been increasing rapidly. Contributing factors include the computerization of many engineering oriented transactions, advances in data collection tools like sensors, RFIDs, and wearable computers, among many others. In addition, popular use of the WWW has flooded us with a huge amount of data and information. This explosive growth in stored data has generated a urgent need for the development of new techniques that can assist us transforming the vast amounts of data into useful information and Knowledge. This course introduces several concepts and techniques of data mining relevant to Civil and Environmental Engineering databases among them artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, statistics, pattern recognition, knowledge-based systems, knowledge acquisition, information retrieval, and data visualization.
