The need to build more facilities has intensified the inherited adverse impacts of the construction industry on the triple bottom lines of sustainability (i.e., people, planet, and profit). The current practice of sustainability in the construction industry is far from reaching the targeted green goals. In order to foster these endeavors, this study aims to explore sustainable construction barriers in the United States. To achieve the objective, first, 12 sustainability barriers were identified based on an excessive and comprehensive literature review and solicitation of experts’ opinions to validate the barriers. Next, a questionnaire survey was developed and distributed among 135 industry professionals to evaluate the relative importance of factors. To offer a practical solution, principal component analysis (PCA) was used to analyze the data and find the most effective barriers. The results show that four major barriers, including (1) pre-construction constraints, (2) managerial constraints, (3) legislative constraints, and (4) financial and planning constraints are the most influential challenges that the industry faces to foster sustainable construction. Practical solutions are suggested to tackle sustainable construction barriers. The findings of this study are beneficial to the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry members along with owners and policymakers.

Today, the advancement in digital infrastructure such as augmented reality (AR), building information modeling (BIM) and image processing (IP) are flourishing the construction industry. AR provides virtual information on physical surfaces which helps to interact with the real world through a combination of virtual information and real information. Advertisement, assembly of equipment, safety tips and facility management are good examples of current application of AR, while BIM has wider implementation in planning, visualization, and demolishing of construction waste. Image processing (IP) is the practice of analyzing an image or video in order to obtain information and set of different characteristics. While some studies have put an effort to take advantage of these advancements separately or in combination, the integration of AR, BIM and image processing can offer a huge advantage to the construction industry in such a way that BIM contains a huge amount of detailed information about building elements which can be imported along with data that can be captured by image processing into an AR application. This study presents a preliminary review of prior studies and current practices that has been conducted in these three areas and integration efforts.

Internships have been shown to be impactful tools to connect students’ learning in academia with real-world industrial needs. To help the students to get more out of their internship experience, some universities provide a summer internship class in which students do class assignments based on their experiences during their internship. There have been numerous studies on the benefits of internships. However, the benefits of a potential internship class for students in construction management (CM) programs at universities have not yet been investigated. This paper demonstrates the structure of an interview-based internship class and investigates its effectiveness. We have focused on the CM program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) as a case study. We sent online questionnaires to the intern students who took the class, students’ mentors, and the professors who taught the class. The results indicate that despite some challenges to meet the requirements of the class, the students, their mentors, and the professor found the class beneficial. The results of this paper are expected to help CM programs with the establishment and improvement of internship classes in their curriculum.