Awards and Honors

Robotics/Automation Challenge Third Place
American Society of Civil Engineers
2025

This award is presented to recognize our robotic AI agent that delivers in-situ guidance to frontline construction workers and enables real-time inspection on construction sites.


Chancellor’s Innovation Fund Award
University of Tennessee Knoxville
2024

This award is presented to recognize outstanding faculty who transform innovative research into commercially viable technologies, fostering a seamless pathway from discovery to market impact.


Best Data Award Competition Second Place
American Society of Civil Engineers
2024

This award is presented to the "Hospital Indoor Object Detection (HIOD) Dataset" for the Best Data Award Competition, hosted by the American Society of Civil Engineers. With 4,417 meticulously curated images and 51,809 precise annotations across 56 object categories, this dataset offers a critical resource for advancing object detection in hospital environments.


Chancellor’s Professional Promise Award
University of Tennessee Knoxville
2023

This award honors faculty who strives for and has achieved excellence in research, scholarship, and creative achievement.


David Goodpasture Award
University of Tennessee Knoxville
2022

This endowed professorship and award is granted for a four-year term to recognize outstanding achievements in both research and teaching in Civil and Environmental Engineering.


Professional Promise in Research Award
University of Tennessee Knoxville
2021

This award recognizes the faculty in the Tickle College of Engineering who have received national and international recognition in their fields and demonstrate strong professional promise in research excellence.


Success in Multidisciplinary Research Award
University of Tennessee Knoxville
2021

This Chancellor’s award recognizes faculty who have successfully secured major external funding and earned recognition for their contributions to multidisciplinary research.


Best Paper Award, Building and Environment
Journal of Building and Environment
2020

This award recognizes a significant contribution to the state of the art that was selected from 4000 papers submitted to the Journal of Building and Environment through four tiers of evaluation. The award was presented for the paper “Segmenting Areas of Potential Contamination for Adaptive Robotic Disinfection in Built Environments” (Shuai Li is the corresponding author).


Collingwood Prize
American Society of Civil Engineers
2018

The Collingwood Prize was instituted and endowed in 1984 by Francis Collingwood, past Secretary of American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). This award recognizes major contributions to knowledge in the field of civil engineering through a published paper in an ASCE journal. The award was presented for the paper “Integrating Natural Language Processing and Spatial Reasoning for Utility Compliance Checking” (Shuai Li is the first author).


Outstanding Reviewer, Computing in Civil Engineering
Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering
2017

This recognition acknowledges the outstanding effort of reviewers for the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering and was selected based on the review quality and timeliness.


Zimmerman Innovation Award
Purdue University
2017

The Mary Ann Zimmerman Purdue Civil Engineering Innovation Award was initiated to recognize, encourage, and promote creative thinking and outreach. It is awarded to an individual to encourage and support civil engineering innovations that further the school’s progress through education, research, conferences, or other outreach activities.


Pai Tao Yeh Fellowship
Purdue University
2016

This fellowship recognizes the research achievement of a civil engineering student at Purdue University and supports the travel for research presentation at prestigious conferences.


Pai Tao Yeh Fellowship
Purdue University
2015

This fellowship recognizes the research achievement of a civil engineering student at Purdue University and supports the travel for research presentation at prestigious conferences.