AI-based Digital Twinning the Built Environment
Lecture abstract
Digital Twinning methods can produce a reliable digital record of the built environment and enable owners to reliably protect, monitor and maintain the condition of their asset. The built environment is comprised of large assets that need significant resource investments to design, construct, maintain and operate them.
Improving productivity, i.e., efficiency and effectiveness, and creating new, disruptive ways to address existing problems throughout their life-cycle can generate significant performance improvements in cost, time, quality, safety, sustainability, and resilience metrics for all involved parties.
Creating and maintaining an up-to-date electronic record of built environment assets in the form of rich Digital Twins can help generate such improvements.
This talk introduces research conducted at the University of Cambridge on inexpensive AI methods for generating object-oriented infrastructure geometry, detecting, and mapping visible defects on the resulting Digital Twin, automatically extracting defect spatial measurements, and sensor and sensor data modelling.
The results of these methods are further exploited through their application in design for manufacturing and assembly (DfMA), mixed-reality-enabled mobile inspection, and proactive asset protection from accidental damage.
Evening schedule
18:00 - 18:30: arrival and registration
18:30 - 19:20: lecture
19:20 - 19:45: Q&A
19:45 - 20:45: reception
Speaker bio
Professor Ioannis Brilakis is the Laing O'Rourke Professor of Civil & Information Engineering and the Director of the Construction Information Technology Laboratory at the Division of Civil Engineering of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.
He completed his PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in 2005. He then worked as an Assistant Professor at the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2005-2008) and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (2008-2012) before moving to Cambridge in 2012 as a Laing O’Rourke Lecturer.
He was promoted to Reader in October 2017 and to Professor in 2021. He has also held visiting posts at the Department of Computer Science, Stanford University as a Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Vision (2014) and at the Technical University of Munich as a Visiting Professor, Leverhulme International Fellow (2018-2019), and Hans Fischer Senior Fellow (2019-2023).
He is a recipient of the 2022 EC3 Scherer Award, 2022 EC3 Thorpe Medal, 2019 ASCE J. James R. Croes Medal, the 2018 ASCE John O. Bickel Award, the 2013 ASCE Collingwood Prize, the 2012 Georgia Tech Outreach Award, a 2010 NSF CAREER award, and a 2009 ASCE Associate Editor Award.
Dr Brilakis is an author of over 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, an Associate Editor of the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering, ASCE Construction Engineering and Management, Elsevier Automation in Construction, and Elsevier Advanced Engineering Informatics Journals, and the lead founder of the European Council on Computing in Construction.
The Janet and Peter Wolf lecture
The lecture recognises the work and contribution to City, University of London of Dr Janet and Professor Peter Wolf and the generous bequest they made to support scientific research in vision science and in engineering at the University. Janet and Peter were stalwarts of City with decades of committed service in Optometry and Visual Science, and in Engineering. The University was largely their lives and their interests remained focussed on research and teaching and inevitably on the students’ welfare and concerns. This lecture is second in a series intended to honour the memory of both Janet and Peter.
The 1st lecture was given by Professor Jack S. Werner, a Distinguished Ophthalmology Professor at the University of California, Davis who researched changes in human vision across the life span and appreciated many of Janet’s research interests in diseases of the retina and visual pathways. Jack made significant contributions to advance the 3-dimensional imaging of the layers of living human retina with important applications in the detection of early-stage diseases of the eye.
Janet was a great admirer of Jack’s scientific achievements, particularly of Jack’s work in understanding how the visual system evolved to compensate for changes in early stages of signal processioning in the retina so as to provide us with stable visual performance from infancy to old.
The 2nd Janet and Peter Wolf Lecture therefore has been planned to recognise and celebrate the work of Professor Peter Wolf FREng who was a world-leading expert in the field of hydrology and the founding Head of the Department of Civil Engineering at City. He led in industrial research and consultancy for many decades on drainage, flood and coastal protection and in-built hydraulic structures, including becoming a director of Pell Frishmann Consulting Engineers, with whom he worked for many years. He was always interested in innovation in engineering, the subject of this year’s lecture.
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