Chedapangu Seema, M.Tech student at the Earthquake Engineering Research Centre (EERC) received high appreciation from the expert panel for her research work on AI-Driven Automated Screening for Seismic Vulnerabilities in Buildings at the Seismic Academy Annual Conference 2025, held in New Delhi, and organized by HILTI India.  Seema was honoured with the top presentation award, recognizing the project’s potential to enable large-scale, data-driven seismic vulnerability assessment, contributing to a safer and more resilient built environment.

The national conference brought together students, researchers, and professionals from across the country, providing an excellent platform to exchange innovative ideas and gain insights into emerging trends in earthquake engineering, seismic risk assessment, and resilience.

Seema’s research focuses on developing an AI-based tool for automated rapid visual screening (RVS) of buildings to identify seismic vulnerabilities. Using a curated dataset of over 1,200 images, the YOLOv8 computer vision model was trained to detect critical features such as soft stories, short columns, and diagonal cracks with an impressive mean Average Precision (mAP50) of 86.5%. The project also incorporates a Gradio-based web interface for real-time image analysis, making the process faster, more accurate, and user-friendly.

October 2025