An opinion piece on the dos and don’ts of artificial intelligence in civil engineering and charting a path from data-driven analysis to causal knowledge discovery

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) has been established as a universal language for solving science and engineering problems. Despite the rise of big data, the success of AI in parallel fields, and exciting works published at this frontier, some in the civil engineering community tie AI to a mystique stigma. And yet, there is also ever-growing inertia to embrace AI fully. The mystique of AI arises because (1) AI is not typically taught in a traditional civil engineering curriculum, (2) the majority of civil engineers remain appliers (as opposed to creators) of AI, and (3) commonly adopted AI algorithms leverage blackbox methods – the opposite to that commonly accepted in the civil engineering domain. We write this opinion piece with the aim of presenting a holistic look into the dos and don’ts of adopting AI into civil engineering.