Artificial intelligence: Saving you money, and helping MassDOT build faster – NBC Boston
We have a lot of questions these days, and a lot of different places to get an answer, but increasingly people are turning to artificial intelligence for those answers, including the state agency tasked with getting us around.
For Santosh Majji, it was an unexpected path that took him to the new frontier of AI.
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“During COVID, all of us had a lot of time, so I started learning AI through online courses,” Majji said.
Those courses led to a job, and then a master’s degree from Northeastern University. And while there, a class project that turned into a full-time job with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and a citation from Gov. Maura Healey along the way.
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At the same time that AI was emerging, MassDOT was dealing with an age-old problem — an influx of new highway engineers trying to get up to speed with thousands of rules, regulations and protocols.
Majji and his team designed the Highway Engineer Knowledge Assistant, a MassDOT chatbot, to help.
“What this tool does for us is it really provides an easy way for them to do that research they need to do and make it applicable to the project they are working on, a huge time saver,” MassDOT Highway Administrator Jonathan Gulliver said.
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MassDOT engineers now use this daily, saving time and taxpayer money, including on the massive Newton-Weston Bridge Replacement Program.
Gulliver said in the near future it will also be used to speed up the agency’s programs to replace aging bridges.
“I think this is one of the most exciting emerging technologies that have come out in a really long time. These AI tools are here to stay, and they are really going to help,” he said.
