INFRAMEET2023

Prof. Kim is the Jimmy D. Clark Distinguished University Professor and Alumni Association Distinguished Graduate Professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at North Carolina State University. He also served as Changjiang Scholar in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Chang’an University in China from 2016 till 2019. Changjiang Scholar is the highest academic award issued to an individual in higher education by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China. Prof. Kim obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Seoul National University, Korea, and Master’s and PhD degrees in Civil Engineering from Texas A&M University. He has over thirty years of experience in both the laboratory and field aspects of the performance evaluation of asphalt materials and pavements.His research is recognized by over $25 million research funding from national and international agencies, including FHWA, USDOT, NCHRP, NSF, and NCDOT, and private industries. Professor Kim is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Korean Academy of Science and Technology. He was the chair of the 2014 ISAP Conference on Asphalt Pavements. Dr. Kim has published over350 papers in national and international technical journals and proceedings. He is the editor of the ASCE book entitled Modeling of Asphalt Concreteandthe Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering and International Journal of Highway Engineering. He has spoken at numerous national and international settings, including over 140 invited/keynote speeches. Professor Kimhas advised 57 PhD students and 44 Masters students during his 33-year tenure at NC State University. His teaching and mentoring efforts were recognized by the Alumni Association Distinguished Graduate Professorship in 2012.Professor Kim has won numerous awards, including the the Walter J. Emmons Best Paper Awards by the Association of Asphalt Paving Technologists (1997, 2006, and 2009), NCSU Alumni Association Outstanding Research Award (2014, 2016), the Alcoa Foundation Distinguished Engineering Research Award (2015), the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Extension (2018), the Alexander Quarles Holladay Medal for Excellence (2019), and the ASCE’s Francis C. Turner Award.The Holladay Medal is the highest award at NC State University to recognize members of the faculty whose careers have demonstrated outstanding achievement and sustained impact in research, teaching or extension and engagement. Also, the Francis C. Turner Award is the flagship award among the ASCE awards in the transportation area. In 2016, Professor Kim became one of the eleven inaugural members of the Research Leadership Academy at NC State University. The Research Leadership Academy is the faculty-driven epicenter of research leadership and faculty mentoring enhancing NCSU’s research culture and is composed of the University’s most outstanding researchers and mentors from diverse fields.

Dr. Kumares C. Sinha is the Olson Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering at Purdue University and a Honorary Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He is a past president of several professional bodies including the Transportation& Development Institute (T&DI) of ASCE, and the Council of University Transportation Centers (CUTC). He was a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB)’s Executive Committee and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)’s Research and Technology Coordinating Committee. Dr. Sinha is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Journal of Transportation Engineering. His recognitions include TRB’s Roy Crum Award (2009); and ASCE’s Frank Turner Lecture Award (1999). He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Dr. Evangelos Sapountzakis is Civil Engineer, Professor at the Institute of Structural Analysis and Antiseismic Research of the Structural Engineering Department of the School of Civil Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He is also Vice Rector for Finance, Programming and Development of NTUA and Director of the Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Program “Structural Design and Analysis of Structures” of NTUA. He obtained his Diploma from NTUA in 1984, the MSc and DIC degrees (Concrete Structures) from Imperial College of Science and Technology of London in 1985 and the PhD degree from NTUA in 1991. He has extensive experience (over 35 years) in the design and analysis of bridge and other largescale structural projects, while since 1996 he has provided consultancy services in various structural and transportation large scale Civil Engineering projects. He has also been a member of the Special Scientific Tender Evaluation Committee for the project: “Study - Construction, Self-financing and Utilisation of the Permanent Bridging Project of Rion - Antirrion”. Apart from NTUA, he is also Professor of Structural Analysis at the School of Corps of Engineers of the Hellenic Army since 1986 and member of the Coactive Educational Staff of the Hellenic Open University (2011-2017). His published research work comprises 130 original papers published in international journals and 181 papers published in international conference proceedings. He is the author of 12 Chapters in books published by International Publishing Companies, 5 Technical Reports, 4 educational books and co-author of 3 educational books. He is the editor of 6 Books or Conference Proceedings. He has participated in 15 financially supported research projects, while in 11 of them as the Principal Investigator. His research work has received intentional recognition, since he is Honorary Editor, Editor-in-Chief, Academic Editor, Regional Editor, Associate Editor of international journals, member of the editorial board of 29 international journals, member of 72 scientific advisory committees of international conferences, while more than 3000 citations have been noticed in international literature. He is also reviewer of scientific papers in more than 60 international journals and evaluator of research proposals of Ministries of Science, Research and Development of 3 foreign countries.

Dr. Zongjin LI is Chair professor at University of Macau. He received his B.E. from Zhejiang University in 1982 and obtained both his M.S. and PhD from North-western University, Chicago, in 1990 and 1993, respectively. He was a fellow of American Concrete Institute, Chair of China Group of RILEM and Founding President of ACI China Chapter. As the chief scientist, he has led a China Key National Basic Research Project (973), ‘Basic study on environmentally friendly contemporary concrete’ that promoted the concrete research in China to a world-class level. He also founded the Gordon Research Conference, ‘‘Advanced Materials for Sustainable Infrastructure Development’ in 2014. He is pioneer in noncontact resistivity/impedance measurement for cement-based materials and lead the research activities in this area for about 20 years. He also developed cement-based piezoelectric and opened a new direction for civil engineering. The methodology he developed to utilizing the in situ polymerization of monomer during cement hydration process has shown a strong effect in enhancing flexural strength of cement-based composite. He has published 5 technical books, in which ‘Advanced Concrete Technology’ published by John Wiley has been collected by many national libraries and major university libraries and used by many universities as text or reference books for civil engineering. He has also published more than 400 technical papers with a Google Scholar citation of 21358 and H-index of 82. He has also been awarded eight US and twenty Chinese patents. Three of his patents have been developed into commercial products. He received the Arthur R. Anderson Medal from American Concrete Institute in 2017 and Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Award from British Royal Academy of Engineering in 2014.

Professor S.L. Chanis the Chair Professor in Computational Structural Engineering at the The Hong Kong Polytechnic University until 2022 when he left and joined a research and engineering company Nida Technology Limited to continue and apply his research to engineering problems. Professor Chan’s research interests include the stability analysis and design of steel, composite and concrete structures, nonlinear finite element analysis, glass and slender skeletal structures, steel, rock and flood barriers, bamboo and aluminum scaffolding and pre-tensioning steel structures. During the past three decades, Professor Chan developed a new design method called the second-order direct analysis (SODA) allowing for imperfections applicable for design of practical structures bypassing the effective length assumption and the prescriptive use of charts and tables in Code. Since 1998, SODA has been applied to the design of numerous steel and composite structures in Hong Kong, Mainland, Singapore, Myanmar, Taiwan and Macau including the 2008 and 2016 award winning projects in Hong Kong and Macau. Over the past decades before epidemic rampage, Professor Chan delivered numerous keynote in international conferences and symposia. Currently, he is as chief editor of 3 international journals and member of board for other 7 journals.

Amir H. Gandomi is a Professor of Data Science and an ARC DECRA Fellow at the Faculty of Engineering & Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney. Prior to joining UTS, Prof. Gandomi was an Assistant Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, USA and a distinguished research fellow in BEACON center, Michigan State University, USA. Prof. Gandomi has published over two hundred journal papers and seven books which collectively have been cited 24,000+ times (H-index = 72). He has been named as one of the most influential scientific minds and Highly Cited Researcher (top 1% publications and 0.1% researchers) for five consecutive years, 2017 to 2021. He also ranked 18th in GP bibliography among more than 12,000 researchers. He has served as associate editor, editor and guest editor in several prestigious journals such as AE of IEEE TBD and IEEE IoTJ. Prof Gandomi is active in delivering keynotes and invited talks. His research interests are global optimisation and (big) data analytics using machine learning and evolutionary computations in particular.

Dr. S.-H. Gary Chan is currently Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong. He is also Affiliate Professor in Innovation, Policy and Entrepreneurship Thrust of HKUST(GZ), Chair of the Committee on Entrepreneurship Education Program at HKUST, and Board Director of Hong Kong Logistics and Supply Chain Multi Tech R&D Center (LSCM). He received MSE and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering with a Minor in Business Administration from Stanford University (Stanford, CA). He obtained his B.S.E. degree (highest honor) in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), with certificates in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Engineering Physics, and Engineering and Management Systems. His research interest includes smart sensing and IoT, cloud and fog/edge computing, indoor localization and mobile computing, video/location/user/data analytics, and IT entrepreneurship. Professor Chan has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and a Vice-Chair of Peer-to-Peer Networking and Communications Technical Sub-Committee of IEEE Comsoc Emerging Technologies Committee. He has been Guest Editor of ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Communication Magazine, etc. He is a steering committee member and was the TPC chair of IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (IEEE CCNC), and area chair of the multimedia symposium of IEEE Globecom and IEEE ICC. Professor Chan has co-founded and transferred his research results to several startups. Due to their innovations and commercial impacts, his startups and research projects have received local and international accolades. Notably, he received Hong Kong Chief Executive's Commendation for Community Service for "outstanding contribution to the fight against COVID-19" in 2020. He is the recipient of Google Mobile 2014 Award and Silver Award of Boeing Research and Technology. He was a visiting professor and researcher in Microsoft Research, Princeton University, Stanford University, and University of California at Davis. At HKUST, he was Director of Entrepreneurship Center, Director of Sino Software Research Institute, Co-director of Risk Management and Business Intelligence program, and Director of Computer Engineering Program. He was a William and Leila Fellow at Stanford University, and the recipient of the Charles Ira Young Memorial Tablet and Medal, and the POEM Newport Award of Excellence at Princeton. He is a member of honor societies Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa, and a Chartered Fellow of The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (FCILT).

Thanos Tzempelikos is a Professor of Civil Engineering at Purdue University, Indiana, USA. His area of specialization is design, operation and optimization of high-performance buildings. It includes experimental and computational studies on building energy performance, indoor environmental quality and comfort, well-being, smart sensing and controls, daylighting systems and building simulation. Dr. Tzempelikos has published more than 150 articles in international scientific journals and conference proceedings and participates in technical committeesand review panels for US and foreign government and research organizations. He serves as Editor for Building and Environment journal, Section Editor for Energy and Buildings journal, and Associate Editor for the ASCE Journal of Energy Engineering. He is the recipient of the ASHRAE New Investigator Award, the Concordia Faculty of Engineering Doctoral Prize, and the Leon Gaster Award. He is the Chair of the bi-annual International High Performance Buildings conference at Purdue since 2010 and a faculty member of the Center for High Performance Buildings. He holds a B.Sc. from the National University of Athens, Greece and M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

Professor Kim is currently a full professor and a graduate chair at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He received the U.S. National Science Foundation, Faculty Early CAREER award (2005), the University Of Hawaii Board of Regent's Excellence in Research Award (2006), and the Excellence in Teaching Award (2017). He obtained a BS (1991) and MS (1994) in Physics in South Korea and MS (1998) and Ph.D. (2001) in Civil Engineering (with an emphasis on Environmental Engineering) at the University of California at Los Angeles. His research area includes computational fluid and statistical dynamics (CFSD) for renewable energy processes, applied mathematics and high-performance computing, and socio-economic-cultural analysis for global water scarcity mitigation.

Soshu Kirihara is a doctor of engineering and a professor of Joining and Welding Research Institute (JWRI), Osaka University, Japan. In his main investigation “Materials Tectonics as Sustainable Geoengineering” for environmental modifications and resource circulations, multi-dimensional structures were successfully fabricated to modulate energy and materials flows effectively. Ceramic and metal components were fabricated directly by smart additive manufacturing, design and evaluation (Smart MADE) using high power ultraviolet laser lithography. Original stereolithography systems were developed, and new start-up company “SK-Fine” was established through academic-industrial collaboration.

Dr. Tarek Zayed, Ph.D., PE, PEng, F.ASCE, F.CSCE, Professor and Associate Head (Research), Dept. of Building and Real Estate, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Dr. Zayed has a Ph.D., M.Sc., and B.Sc. in Construction Engineering and Management. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, in May 2001. He conducted research on infrastructure / asset management; simulation, fuzzy, optimization,risk assessment, data mining,and artificial intelligence applications in construction;and performance, budget allocation, and life cycle cost analysis for municipal underground system. He has more than 30 years of professional experience working in the construction industry training and in academic posts in USA, Canada and Hong Kong. Dr. Zayed started recently to look collectively at the three municipal key infrastructure systems, i.e. water, sewer and roads, to develop informed decision support system(s) to municipal engineers. Dr. Zayed has published around500 journal and conference articles and performed research with significant amount of funding from government and private funding agencies.He is serving as associate editor of the ASCE’s journal of pipeline systems engineering and practice and the Canadian journal of civil engineering. Dr. Zayed is also a fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (F.ASCE) and the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (F.CSCE). He is ranked top 1.0% of scholars in Civil Engineering worldwide based on a study by Stanford University

Maria Paola Santisi d’Avila is Assistant Professor in the Polytech Nice Sophia engineering school of the Côte d’Azur University, in France. Her teaching activity and research interests at the Smart building Department and PolytechLab laboratory, respectively,is related to structural design in seismic zones, modeling techniques for soil-structure interaction, site effects in saturated soils, ductility estimation in the case of new construction materials and structural identification using ambient noise records for existing structures.She is civil engineer specialized in structural design, with a master’s degree in earthquake engineering. She obtained her PhD in Civil Engineering and Risks from the University of Messina (Italy) in 2008 investigating about a reinforced concrete shell element model, simultaneously loaded with in-plane internal forces, bending and twisting moments and shear, using a three-dimensional nonlinear constitutive model. She developed this research at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Shestartedherpostdoctoralresearchactivity in Paris (Laboratoire Central de Ponts et Chaussées, Ecole Polytechnique, Université Pierre et Marie Curie). In 2012, she had a position at the Côte d’Azur University and in 2018 she obtained the habilitation to conduct research. Maria Paola Santisi d’Avila developed numerical models to simulate the multiaxial stress behavior of materials and structures under earthquake and vibrational loading, in particular, thethree-component seismic wave propagation in multilayered saturated soil having nonlinear elasto-plastic behavior.

Dr. Agapaki is an Assistant Professor in the M.E. Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management and an Affiliated Faculty member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Florida. Her teaching and research interests are data analytics, AI applications in civil engineering, infrastructure computer vision,Digital Twinning and automation in construction. She obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2020, where her research pioneered the automated generation of geometric Digital Twins of existing industrial facilities from LiDAR data at a commercially viable level. She conducted part of her PhD research at MIT and was awarded the U.S. National Academy of Engineering grant for addressing one of the 14 Grand Challenges in Engineering of our century. She also holds an MSc in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering from UCLA and a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece. She has extensive industry experience working as Innovation Lead at PTC Boston, where she led innovation projects on computer vision and deep learning applications in the manufacturing industry, and AVEVA, where she advised the AI team on machine learning methods for complex data (3D point cloud processing methods). Dr. Agapaki is the Director of the Digital Twins research lab.

Dr. Biao HU is currently an Assistant Professor at the College of Civil and Transportation Engineering, Shenzhen University, P.R. China. He obtained his Ph.D. from the City University of Hong Kong in 2017. His main research focuses on composite materials & structures, structural retrofitting, and sustainable construction materials. He has published some 40 technical papers in international journals and conference proceedings (including 30 SCI papers), and these works received more than 500 citations recorded in Google Scholar. He is the principal investigator of 4 research projects and the co-investigator of more than 10 research projects. He serves as the editorial board member of several journals (Journal of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Building Technology Research and Construction Progress) and the guest editor of Polymers. He is a regular reviewer of more than 30 peer-reviewed international SCI journals. He received the Moisseiff Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2018.

Antonio Domingues de Figueiredo is a civil engineer since 1987 and associate professor at the Department of Civil Construction Engineering at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo. He developed his post-doctorate in 2010 at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona Tech) in Barcelona, Spain. He worked as a director of IBRACON (Brazilian Institute of Concrete) since 2003. He participated in four committees of the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT) where he contributed to the publication of several technical standards mainly focusing on shotcrete, concrete admixtures, and fiber reinforced concrete. He has more than 140 articles published in national and international congresses and 78 papers published in journals. He has one book published focusing on the fiber reinforced concrete application and six technical book chapters published. He conducts research on topics related to special concretes such as fiber reinforced concrete, shotcrete, precast concrete elements, recycled aggregates, admixtures and quality control.

Dr. El Nemr has 25 years of experience in contracts and claims management, encompassing positions in various international project management firms, such as Bechtel, Fluor Daniel and Hill International. He has also assumed several roles during dispute resolution proceedings in construction projects, acting as arbitrator, expert adjudicator, expert appointed by the tribunal, expert appointed by an arbitration party, arbitrator and dispute adjudication board (DAB) member. He is Regional Director (MENA) of the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE) International – Greater Cairo section, Regional Director (MENA) of the Dispute Resolution Board Foundation (DRBF) and Vice President of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (CIARB) – Egypt Branch,. He is the author of numerous papers and a speaker in numerous conferences, seminars and webinars on the topic of construction contracts and claims.He is currently the Contracts Director of Hill International’s North Africa branch, based in Egypt, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at The American University in Cairo in the construction engineering department.