
CEA researchers awarded Best Project at EC3 Summer School
Doctoral researchers Vanessa Costalonga and Silvia Vangelova were awarded best project at EC3 Summer School.
On 11 July 2025, doctoral researchers Vanessa Costalonga and Silvia Vangelova were awarded best project at the European Council on Computing in Construction (EC3) Summer School.
Their project “Users as Sensors: Leveraging LLMs for Digital Building Logbooks,” developed in Porto with Paola Cavallaro (Politecnico di Torino), Lan Xu (Chongqing University) and Li Zhi (Chongqing University), explores methods of facilitating renovation and maintenance that contribute to the extension of a building's life cycle. While a digital twin model can help with the operation phase of a building, many existing buildings lack comprehensive digital documentation. Moreover, sensor-based monitoring can be costly and difficult to maintain over time. To address this, the team proposed a workflow that crowdsources user feedback, processes it with a large language model, and links it to an expert knowledge base via retrieval-augmented generation. The system analyses the feedback and provides actionable maintenance suggestions to building owners or facility managers. Once an intervention is implemented, it is documented and added to a structured database, forming the foundation of a digital renovation passport. By collecting user input and repair data, the project contributes to building a more inclusive and data-rich digital building logbook, which can be used to create a multimodal digital twin.
Jury members included André Borrmann, Mirosław Skibniewski, Tony Thorpe and Weiwei Chen. The award ceremony took place in the Casa da Musica in Porto, Portugal, with Karen Blay and Weiwei Chen and Pieter Pauwels handing the awards to the team.
The Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture (CEA) develops research on matching reused architectural materials with people and projects through digitalization for a circular built environment. For more information visit our webpage.