Civil engineering faculty sharing knowledge worldwide

Civil engineering faculty at Illinois have always been committed to the advancement of scientific knowledge and technical expertise and to the sharing and transmission of such values to others. A number of professors in the Transportation Group at Illinois have been particularly active in exchanging know-how and experience with their peers.

Among those faculty are Jeffery Roesler, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Illinois, who, with Erwin Kohler, director of the International Society of Concrete Pavements (ISCP), organized a workshop in Guatemala City, Guatemala, titled “Concrete Pavement Innovation and Technology Transfer.”

The objective of the workshop was to provide an overview of emerging technologies for concrete pavement applications for the road network. Presentations focused on pavement monitoring and evaluation and the best equipment used for this purpose, including laser scanning for distresses and LiDAR, concrete overlays, pavement management systems, and modern roller-compacted concrete pavements.

Sponsored by Cementos Progresos, Mixto Listo (Ready Mixed), and ISCP, the workshop was attended by approximately 65 people. More details about the workshop can be found on the ISCP website.

Another Illinois faculty member, Yanfeng Ouyang, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is participating in several conferences this summer, including the Society of American Military Engineers’ Joint Engineer Training Conference and Expo, which will be held May 24–26 at the Phoenix Convention Center, Arizona. This premier education and training conference focuses on developing solutions that benefit national security, including uniformed service members, federal, state and municipal civilians, and private-sector industry firms.

Invitations have also been extended to Ouyang to serve as a keynote speaker at the 13th International Conference on Service Systems and Service Management, June 24–26 in Kunming, China. The conference provides a platform for researchers, scholars, practitioners, and government officials involved in service systems and service management to disseminate their latest research results and exchange views on future research directions.

Ouyang will also be the keynote speaker at the 2016 International Workshop on Computational Transportation Science, which will focus on quantitative methods and analyses of transport systems. That workshop will be held July 18–20 at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.

Among the other technology transfer efforts that Ouyang will be participating in this summer are the 2016 INFORMS International Conference, which features emerging topics ranging from global supply chains to social networks, and the 7th Civil Engineering Conference in the Asian Region—a major activity of the Asian Civil Engineering Coordinating Council held on a triennial basis to highlight strides made in sustainable civil engineering infrastructure applicable to the Asia–Pacific Region.