A new international organization, the Built Environment Technology Association (BETA), has been established to equip the real estate, construction, design, urban planning and facility management industries to better understand and utilize contemporary and developing technologies for the built environment.

BETA will foster collaborative relationships with companies, vendors and trade organizations, develop a real-time communication portal, commission research and produce educational and training products for these transformational technologies.

Keeping informed of the variety of technological fields can be challenging. Relevant technological frontiers are constantly evolving, merging, splitting and changing.

Advances include smart buildings, building automation systems, artificial intelligence and augmented reality, design, material and construction technologies, blockchain, cyber security, the Internet of Things (IoT), the cloud, mobility and analytics, integrated workplace management solutions (IWMS), building information modeling, 3D/4D/5D printing, drones and more.

Industry organizations exploring these technologies remain segmented. Depending on where in the building life-cycle they are primarily concerned, these groups evaluate different technological fields, and even when they consider similar fields they do so with different criteria.

BETA will provide a platform and a community for people to come together from all over the world to discover what technologies are available at every stage of the built environment.This community will include industry experts, end users and vendors from both the private and public sectors.

For ongoing developments visit www.smartbeta.tech