FW-HTF-P: Fostering Transferable Skills for Future-Ready Extraterrestrial Construction Workforce via an Intelligent-Immersive Training Environment

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The vision of becoming an interplanetary species requires the construction industry to face an unprecedented challenge: extraterrestrial construction. We envision the future frontier of the construction industry as extraterrestrial construction where the role of workers and their required skills will be significantly different. For the envisioned future extraterrestrial construction industry, our interdisciplinary research team is interested in exploring how Industry 4.0 emerging technologies rooted in digitalization and artificial intelligence can enable a future-ready construction workforce by integrating transferable skills into training environments. In this project, the guiding principles are (1) developing a better understanding of definition, hierarchy, and categorization of transferable skills in the context of future extraterrestrial workforce development, and (2) exploring and advancing training environments enabled by adapting emerging technologies and with a focus on transferable skills to make the existing workers become ready for the future frontier. Our interdisciplinary team will investigate the technological and human dimensions of this vision.This project will investigate and identify the nature of future extraterrestrial construction and the hierarchy of the skills required by future workers, as well as emerging technologies that can be utilized to integrate transferable skills for developing a future-ready workforce. In addition, we will design, prototype, and evaluate an intelligent-immersive training environment using AI-assisted, simulation-based virtual constructs on training the existing workers in specific transferable skills to make them ready for the future frontier. In particular, the project team will explore and prototype an intelligent-immersive training environment that addresses the needs for training working professionals to foster transferable skills of future extraterrestrial construction workers. The research effort will advance existing knowledge in the following three main areas: (1) the effectiveness of the intelligent-immersive training environment for fostering transferable skills, i.e., computational thinking, fluid reasoning, and agility, (2) the effectiveness of the training environment for improving knowledge acquisition, retention, and performance of future extraterrestrial construction workers and (3) an AI-based approach to learning scaffolding and personalized learning in order to address specific needs of working professionals.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.