The design, construction, maintenance and upgrading of geotechnical infrastructure requires fresh thinking to minimize use of materials, energy and labor but to keep its resiliency against natural hazards. 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 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.

Speaker Bio:

Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair in Mineral Engineering and a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also 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. 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 Geomechanics. He is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers.