Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Professor and a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He obtained his BEng and MEng from Kyoto University in Japan and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. His current research activities are infrastructure sensing, performance based design and maintenance of infrastructure, energy geotechnics, and geomechanics. He is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
Design, construction, maintenance and upgrading of civil engineering infrastructure requires fresh thinking to minimize use of materials, energy and labor. This can only be achieved by understanding the actual performance of the infrastructure, both during its construction and throughout its design life, through innovative monitoring. Advances in sensor systems and data analytics 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. However, the quantification of infrastructure system resilience is a challenge for both stakeholders and service providers in the civil engineering industry. Describing the contributions in a way that brings the provider and consumer together is critical to the widespread adoption of emerging technologies developed for improving infrastructure resilience. This talk will also discuss a methodology that explores how emerging technologies can contribute to infrastructure resilience.