Northeastern Graduate Builds AI Assistant for MassDOT
Sai Panindra Santosh Kumar Majji, MS’24, engineering management, created a generative artificial intelligence assistant called the Highway Engineer Knowledge Assistant (HEKA) for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to help organize projects, documents and information for the engineering team.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cyrus Moulton. Main photo: Northeastern graduate Sai Panindra Santosh Kumar Majji worked with MassDOT to develop a generative artificial intelligence assistant. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University.
AI assistant built by Northeastern grad helps MassDOT engineers work faster
Amid a wave of retirements and heavy workloads, who can the new engineers who design Massachusetts’ highway network go to for advice?
Thanks to Northeastern University graduate Sai Panindra Santosh Kumar Majji, the answer is a generative artificial intelligence assistant nicknamed HEKA.
“Heka is also the name of the Egyptian god of knowledge — he devours all the knowledge and spreads it,” Majji says. “So it kinda makes sense.”
The Highway Engineer Knowledge Assistant (HEKA) is one of the first AI tools the state has rolled out as a result of the AI for Impact program, a collaboration between Northeastern and the state of Massachusetts that places co-ops with state agencies to work on AI projects.
Majji was a student in the first cohort of the program in spring 2024, working with the state Department of Transportation, known as MassDOT, and its highway division to help find a better way to onboard new hires.
“The problem is there is so much documentation,” says Anu Goutham, deputy chief information officer at MassDOT. “Depending on where the engineer is hired into — whether it’s the bridge division, maintenance division, construction division, safety division, etc. — they’ve got to get up to speed in terms of the baseline processes and standard operating procedures, the specifications and more.”
The documents had been digitized in recent years. But the sheer number of documents, the amount of information they contained, and the amount of information that each engineering project entailed made an AI assistant valuable.
“We realized that if we can use AI so that we can provide engineers answers to all their questions quickly, help them with finding documents and finding the correct project requirements and everything, that would be really helpful,” Majji says.
Read full story at Northeastern Global News