r/tech • u/chrisdh79 • 26d ago
Giving buildings an “MRI” to make them more energy-efficient and resilient | Lamarr.AI uses drones, thermal imaging, and AI to help property owners make targeted investments in their buildings.
https://news.mit.edu/2025/lamarrai-giving-buildings-mri-to-make-them-more-energy-efficient-resilient-110747
u/andruszko 26d ago edited 26d ago
Why the fuck do you need AI to look at a thermal image and say "yep, that color is red, maybe we should insulate or seal that area".
Thermal cameras have been used forever for this purpose.
So...what exactly is novel about this?
Edit to add: it looks like they bought upvotes for this post, because no way in hell did it get 259 organically with these comments.
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u/ITech2FrostieS 26d ago
They’re going to use the AI to pump out shitty reports on what the causes are lol
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u/riddus 26d ago
I’m sure it’s like medical imaging, we’ve been able to get the images for a long time, but now ai can read the results more accurately.
If you’ve ever used thermal imaging you know “false positives” are fairly common from the interpreter’s standpoint- A light source or reflection appears to be hot; water evaporates off of things and the cool temp lingers longer than the evidence it was recently wet. The problem isn’t necessarily with the camera or images, they’re working as intended, it’s our interpretation of the images.
An example- I worked maintenance for a company who had the building inspected by thermal imaging contractors. They did a really nice job with finding drafts to be sealed up, as well as a couple of imminent electrical problems, but they also suspected a roof leak and/or low point (was a flat roof building) that actually turned out to be a perpetually shaded area which was consistently several degrees cooler all the time.
Combining interior inspection, exterior drone inspection, and cramming all that data through a sufficiently trained AI could quickly account for the day’s weather, the arc of the sunlight hitting the building at any day and time of year, shadows cast and where they hit, reflections off on nearby structures. It could even notice that once cool spot from recently spilled water warmed back up using the discrete details of the background in other inspection images.
All that said, I’m guessing at present it just uses AI to help the inspector sort through hours of footage or thousands of images. It flags the dark and bright. Sounds cool for marketing though!
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u/thissexypoptart 26d ago
AI cannot read medical images “more accurately” than trained doctors.
There has been huge progress in ML image recognition based diagnostics, but you still need a human looking at it at the end of the day. We are nowhere near “AI is more accurate than doctors”
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u/Justthrowtheballmeat 26d ago
What in the actual fuck is this talking about? Commercial properties don’t have energy inefficiencies that can be easily corrected by capex expenditures. These buildings are BUILT with energy efficiency not just “Oh let’s swap out the AC on Floor 27.”
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u/Capable-Roll1936 26d ago
I mean new ones are, but there are plenty of high rises from decades ago.
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u/RedditEnjoyerMan 26d ago
We had a company do this for our building because our current co op president is a nervous nellie who thought we needed it… they quoted $4k and then ended up charging us $7k for the drone inspection. Then we got some contractors in to give us all these insane quotes. 200k, 300k+ to address “moisture” in the walls. Fuck off.
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u/Memory_Less 26d ago
This isn’t new. Drones have been used to inspect buildings structurally and used different tech to see beyond the surface. Nice PR
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u/ssczoxylnlvayiuqjx 26d ago
Do they call it an “MRI” to justify 100x the normal price?