The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) is transforming opportunities in geotechnical engineering, where workflows rely on complex, text-rich data. While general-purpose LLMs demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities, their effectiveness in geotechnical applications is constrained by limited exposure to specialized terminology and domain logic. Thus, domain adaptation, tailoring general LLMs for geotechnical use, has become essential. This paper presents the first systematic review of LLM adaptation and application in geotechnical contexts. It critically examines four key adaptation strategies, including prompt engineering, retrieval augmented generation, domain-adaptive pretraining, and fine-tuning, and evaluates their comparative benefits, limitations, and implementation trends. This review synthesizes current applications spanning geological interpretation, subsurface characterization, design analysis, numerical modeling, risk assessment, and geotechnical education. Findings show that domain-adapted LLMs substantially improve reasoning accuracy, automation, and interpretability, yet remain limited by data scarcity, validation challenges, and explainability concerns. Future research directions are also suggested. This review establishes a critical foundation for developing geotechnically literate LLMs and guides researchers and practitioners in advancing the digital transformation of geotechnical engineering.

Despite the widespread interest in machine learning (ML), the engineering industry has not yet fully adopted ML-based methods, which has left engineers and stakeholders uncertain about the legal and regulatory frameworks that govern their decisions. This gap remains unaddressed as an engineer's decision-making process, typically governed by professional ethics and practical guidelines, now intersects with complex algorithmic outputs. To bridge this gap, this paper explores how engineers can navigate legal principles and legislative justifications that support and/or contest the deployment of ML technologies. Drawing on recent precedents and experiences gained from other fields, this paper argues that analogical reasoning can provide a basis for embedding ML within existing engineering codes while maintaining professional accountability and meeting safety requirements. In exploring these issues, the discussion focuses on established liability doctrines, such as negligence and product liability, and highlights how courts have evaluated the use of predictive models. We further analyze how legislative bodies and standard-setting organizations can furnish explicit guidance equivalent to prior endorsements of emergent technologies. This exploration stresses the vitality of understanding the interplay between technical justifications and legal precedents for shaping an informed stance on ML's legitimacy in engineering practice. Finally, our analysis catalyzes a legal framework for integrating ML through which stakeholders can critically assess the responsibilities, liabilities, and benefits inherent in ML-driven engineering solutions.

This study investigates router-based multi-agent systems for automating foundation design calculations through intelligent task classification and expert selection. Three approaches were evaluated: single-agent processing, multi-agent designer-checker architecture, and router-based expert selection. Performance assessment utilized baseline models including DeepSeek R1, ChatGPT 4 Turbo, Grok 3, and Gemini 2.5 Pro across shallow foundation and pile design scenarios. The router-based configuration achieved performance scores of 95.00% for shallow foundations and 90.63% for pile design, representing improvements of 8.75 and 3.13 percentage points over standalone Grok 3 performance respectively. The system outperformed conventional agentic workflows by 10.0 to 43.75 percentage points. Grok 3 demonstrated superior standalone performance without external computational tools, indicating advances in direct LLM mathematical reasoning for engineering applications. The dual-tier classification framework successfully distinguished foundation types, enabling appropriate analytical approaches. Results establish router-based multi-agent systems as optimal for foundation design automation while maintaining professional documentation standards. Given safety-critical requirements in civil engineering, continued human oversight remains essential, positioning these systems as advanced computational assistance tools rather than autonomous design replacements in professional practice.

Responsible prompt engineering has emerged as a critical framework for ensuring that generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems serve society's needs while minimizing potential harms. As generative AI applications become increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, the way we instruct and interact with them through prompts has profound implications for fairness, accountability, and transparency. This article examines how strategic prompt engineering can embed ethical and legal considerations and societal values directly into AI interactions, moving beyond mere technical optimization for functionality. This article proposes a comprehensive framework for responsible prompt engineering that encompasses five interconnected components: prompt design, system selection, system configuration, performance evaluation, and prompt management. Drawing from empirical evidence, the paper demonstrates how each component can be leveraged to promote improved societal outcomes while mitigating potential risks. The analysis reveals that effective prompt engineering requires a delicate balance between technical precision and ethical consciousness, combining the systematic rigor and focus on functionality with the nuanced understanding of social impact. Through examination of real-world and emerging practices, the article illustrates how responsible prompt engineering serves as a crucial bridge between AI development and deployment, enabling organizations to fine-tune AI outputs without modifying underlying model architectures. This approach aligns with broader "Responsibility by Design" principles, embedding ethical considerations directly into the implementation process rather than treating them as post-hoc additions. The article concludes by identifying key research directions and practical guidelines for advancing the field of responsible prompt engineering.

Today, many systems use artificial intelligence (AI) to solve complex problems. While this often increases system effectiveness, developing a production-ready AI-based system is a difficult task. Thus, solid AI engineering practices are required to ensure the quality of the resulting system and to improve the development process. While several practices have already been proposed for the development of AI-based systems, detailed practical experiences of applying these practices are rare. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by collecting such experiences during a case study, namely the development of an autonomous stock trading system that uses machine learning functionality to invest in stocks. We selected 10 AI engineering practices from the literature and systematically applied them during development, with the goal to collect evidence about their applicability and effectiveness. Using structured field notes, we documented our experiences. Furthermore, we also used field notes to document challenges that occurred during the development, and the solutions we applied to overcome them. Afterwards, we analyzed the collected field notes, and evaluated how each practice improved the development. Lastly, we compared our evidence with existing literature. Most applied practices improved our system, albeit to varying extent, and we were able to overcome all major challenges. The qualitative results provide detailed accounts about 10 AI engineering practices, as well as challenges and solutions associated with such a project. Our experiences therefore enrich the emerging body of evidence in this field, which may be especially helpful for practitioner teams new to AI engineering.

The word'MLOps' became a hot keyword these days. The trend is poised to continue as AI takes more roles in the industry and society as a whole. The article is aimed at explaining what MLOps is and why the concern for data quality should be at the center of MLOps. The word MLOps is the combination of Machine Learning (ML) and Operations (MLOps ML Ops). It refers to the set of engineering practices to develop and operate machine learning models in production.

As demands for AI applications grow, we've seen a lot of effort put by companies to build their Machine Learning Engineering (MLE) tools tailored for their needs. There are just so many challenges faced by industries in regards to having a well-designed environment for their Machine Learning (ML) lifecycle: building, deploying, and managing ML models in production. This post will cover two papers, explaining MLE practices from two of the leading tech companies: Google and Microsoft. Adding a little bit of context, this article is part of a graduate-level course at Columbia University: COMS6998 Practical Deep Learning System Performance taught by Prof. Parijat Dube who also works at IBM New York as Research Staff Member. The first section will present a paper from Google and will touch on the building part of an ML lifecycle.

We are studying the emerging discipline of Machine Learning Engineering by investigating best practices for developing software systems that include ML components. In this article, we share the research motivation and approach, some initial results, and an invitation to help us by taking our 7-minute online survey on ML Engineering best practices. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undeniably experiencing a new wave of attention, energy, and sky-high expectations. This wave is driven by the abundance of data that is generated in our connected, digital society, and by the low-barrier availability of enormous computational resources. Among various AI-techniques, Machine Learning (ML) in particular has come to play a key role.

Python is a prevalent programming language in machine learning (ML) community. A lot of Python engineers and data scientists feel the lack of engineering practices like versioning large datasets and ML models, and the lack of reproducibility. This lack is particularly acute for engineers who just moved to ML space. We will discuss the current practices of organizing ML projects using traditional open-source toolset like Git and Git-LFS as well as this toolset limitation. Thereby motivation for developing new ML specific version control systems will be explained.