Fiatech

FULL TITLE: Data Management, Visualization, and Knowledge Discovery for Advanced Infrastructure Systems – The Civil Engineering Perspective

Presented by: Dr. Lucio Soibelman, Professor and Chair, University of Southern California

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It is certainly no surprise that construction and operations of infrastructure systems require a huge amount of information from specifications, plans, construction documents, inventory management, cost estimating, and scheduling, for the construction phase and maintenance records, inspections and sensor data from the operations phase. As this industry adopts new computer technologies, computerized construction/operations data are becoming more and more available. There exist numerous opportunities to exploit and extract knowledge from the vast amount of infrastructure data. Unlike much previous research in Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) that has been successfully applied in several domains, in the infrastructure domain, however, the data are of multiple types and from many different sources, some with very low quality.

Professor Soibelman will be introducing the results obtained from several studies that he worked during the last few years. The first research to be presented is a study that was developed while he was a faculty at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in collaboration with his PhD students Carlos Caldas and Ioannis Brilakis to develop methods for integrating unstructured text documents and pictures in A/E/C model based systems. In this study, automated processes for retrieval, classification, and integration of unstructured documents in A/E/C model based systems were explored. Specifically, a combination of techniques from the areas of information retrieval, text mining, image reasoning, and computer vision were analyzed to develop visual interfaces that allow the identification of documents/pictures relevant to each component of the project model. Then Professor Soibelman will introduce some of the work that he developed with several collaborators while he was a faculty at the Advanced Infrastructure Systems group at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University.  He will introduce the research developed in collaboration with the PhD student Wei Guo and  with Professor James Garrett that advanced image reasoning methodologies with the objective of supporting a sewer inspection robot to detect and automatically classify sewage defects, a research in collaboration with the PhD student Chung-Yan Shih and with Professors James Garrett and Scott Matthews that developed a geospatial data warehouse decision support framework for electricity production vulnerability assessment to help decision makers understand the impact of fuel delivery disruption and the vulnerabilities in the coal transportation system, a research in collaboration with the PhD student Daniel Oliveira and with Professor James Garrett that developed a geospatial network based clustering tool to understand causes for water distribution systems breaks, a research in collaboration with the PhD student Yujie Ying and with Professors Irving Oppenheim, Jose Moura, and James Garrett that developed new time reversal signal processing tools to support advanced pipeline sensing, and finally a research in collaboration with the PhD Mario Berges now an Assistant Professor at CMU, with Professor Scott Matthews, and with several engineers from Bosch that developed an electricity metering data analysis tool to support better user decision making for home energy consumption.