Evento

ASCE Seattle Section Geotechnical Group - February 2019 Dinner Meeting

Smart Infrastructure and Construction

Professor Kenichi Soga
Chancellor's Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Berkeley

Design, construction, maintenance and upgrading of geotechnical infrastructure requires fresh thinking to minimize use of materials, energy and labor. This can only be achieved by understanding the performance of the infrastructure, both during its construction and throughout its design life, through innovative monitoring. Advances in sensor systems offer intriguing possibilities to radically alter methods of condition assessment and monitoring of infrastructure. In this talk, it is hypothesized that the future of infrastructure relies on smarter information; the rich information obtained from embedded sensors within infrastructure will act as a catalyst for new design, construction, operation and maintenance processes for integrated infrastructure systems linked directly with user behavior patterns and city-scale modeling. Some examples of emerging sensor technologies for infrastructure sensing are given. They include distributed fiber-optics sensors, computer vision, wireless sensor networks, low-power micro-electromechanical systems, energy harvesting and citizens as sensors.

Kenichi Soga is a Chancellors Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He obtained his BEng and MEng from Kyoto University in Japan and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He was Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Cambridge before joining UC Berkeley in 2016. He has published more than 400 journal and conference papers and is the co-author of "Fundamentals of Soil Behavior, 3rd edition" with Professor James K Mitchell. His current research activities are Infrastructure sensing, Performance based design and maintenance of underground structures, Energy geotechnics, and Geotechnics from micro to macro. He is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He is the recipient of awards including George Stephenson Medal and Telford Gold Medal from the Institution of Civil Engineers and Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers.