Fernanda Leite has a passion for teaching and technology. A tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, she clearly delights in the research her graduate students are doing. Third-year Ph.D. student Li Wang, for example, is capturing decisions made by experts while resolving clashes detected in building information models to help train novice designers in the future.

"We developed a plug-in that works with Autodesk Navisworks to link comments directly to 3D elements so that, later, we can pull the information and learn from it," says Wang. Leite adds, "If we can learn how experts make decisions and put all those decisions in a database, then we can use machine-learning algorithms to suggest new decisions based on hundreds or thousands made in the past." The researchers use UT's Visualization Laboratory for design coordination meetings, so contractors can see 3D models at a larger scale.