from my point of view Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) is a suitable subject for your dissertation because you can focus on AI, DL and ML applications to localize and quantify the damage in the structures. Now a days AI specially machine learning and deep learning algorithms have been utilized in different topics for example in the field of seismic resiliency, seismic hazard analysis, 3D printing and other topics but I think these fields have lost their novelty and combining these subjects with AI tan to be beneficial with the aims of publishing excellent papers and working on them.