associate professor
Department of Construction Technology and Management
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
He has 30 years experiences in higher education teaching various aspects of Construction Management in English and in Hungarian in courses organized for students from numerous countries. His professional interest spreads from time- and cost estimates through construction technologies, heavy equipment and site-layout design to engineering economics and risk management. Fellow reviewer of more professional and scientific periodicals. His research interests are Combinatorial Models in Construction, including Scheduling and Network Techniques. Member of Hungarian Chamber of Engineers, Certified designer and expert of Construction Technologies and of Construction Management. Contributed in preparing and monitoring numerous construction projects in Hungary and, as forensic engineer, in arbitrating client-contractor disputes at more construction projects. His special field is time- and cost estimates.
Behrokh Khoshnevis is a Dean’s Professor at the University of Southern California and is the Director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies (CRAFT) at USC. He is active in robotics, and mechatronics related research and development projects that include the development of several novel Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing) processes such as Contour Crafting for mega-scale fabrication, SIS family of technologies for polymeric, metallic and ceramic parts and SSS for high temperature alloys and ceramics, as well as development of mechatronics systems for biomedical applications, autonomous mobile and modular robots for fabrication and assembly on earth, in space and on other planets, and specialized innovative equipment for oil and gas industry. He has numerous inventions and 70 US and international patents and over 160 refereed technical publications. Dr. Khoshnevis’ inventions routinely receive extensive worldwide publicity. Because of his Contour Crafting invention he received the 2014 Grand Prize among 1000+ globally competing technologies in the Create the Future design contest which was organized by NASA Tech Briefs Media Group and sponsored by HP, Intel and other major industries. Contour Crafting was selected earlier as one of the top 25 out of more than 4000 candidate inventions by the History Channel Modern Marvels program and the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame. The technology has been exhibited in numerous science & technology and art museums around the world. Dr. Khoshnevis’ educational activities at USC include the teaching of a popular graduate course on Invention and Technology Development. He routinely conducts lectures and seminars and gives keynote speeches on the subject of invention. His TEDx talk on the subject of automated construction has been viewed more than one million times and is selected by the TED organization as one of five TEDx Moments among over 30,000 presentations.
Behrokh Khoshnevis
University of Southern California, USA
The nature of construction has remained intensely manual throughout recorded history. Unlike in manufacturing, the growth of automation in construction has been slow. A promising new automation approach is Contour Crafting (CC). Invented by the speaker, Contour Crafting is a mega-scale 3D fabrication process aiming at automated on-site construction of whole structures as well as subcomponents. The potential of CC has become evident from experiments with various materials, geometries and scales. Using this process, a single building or a colony of buildings may be constructed automatically with all plumbing and electrical utilities imbedded in each; yet each building could have a different design which can include complex curved features. The technology also has astounding environmental and energy impacts. The entry level implication is especially profound for emergency shelter construction and low income housing. NASA is exploring possible applications of CC in building on other planets. This new mode of construction will be one of the very few feasible approaches for building using in-situ material on planets such as Moon and Mars, which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the century. CC has received international attention and could soon revolutionize the construction industry.
Dr. Borja García de Soto is a Scientific Associate at the Infrastructure Management Group in the Institute of Construction and Infrastructure Management at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH). He received the degree of Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from Florida International University (FIU) in 2000, the degree of Master of Science in Civil Engineering in the area of Structural Design from FIU in 2001, the degree of Master of Science in Engineering in the area of Engineering and Project Management from the University of California at Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) in 2004, and a Ph.D. in the area of Project and Infrastructure Management from ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2014. Dr. García de Soto is a registered civil engineer (Professional Engineer (PE) license in California and Florida) with international experience in multiple aspects of project management, including risk management and control, delay analysis, forensic engineering, and project cost estimating. His research interests include the application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques (such as neural networks and case-based reasoning), sustainable and resilient infrastructures, data-sensing and automation, and information management and modeling in the field of infrastructure and project management. In 2015 he founded the ASCE Switzerland Group and he is currently the president.
Dr. Ioannis Brilakis is a Laing O’Rourke Lecturer of Construction Engineering and the Director of the Construction Information Technology Laboratory at the Division of Civil Engineering of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. He then worked as an Assistant Professor at the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2005-2008) and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (2008-2012). He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the 2013 ASCE Collingwood Prize, the 2012 Georgia Tech Outreach Award and the 2009 ASCE Associate Editor Award. Dr. Brilakis is an author of over 150 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, an Associate Editor of the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering, ASCE Construction Engineering and Management, Elsevier Automation in Construction, and Elsevier Advanced Engineering Informatics Journals, and a past-chair and founder of the ASCE TCCIT Data Sensing and Analysis Committee, and the TRB AFH10 (1) Information Systems in Construction Management Subcommittee.
Virtualizing Infrastructure
Ioannis Brilakis, Ph.D.
University of Cambridge
Vertical and horizontal infrastructure is comprised of capital-intensive assets that need sizable budgets to design, construct and operate/maintain them. Cost reductions throughout their lifecycle can generate significant savings to all involved parties. Such reductions can be derived directly through productivity improvements or indirectly through safety and quality control improvements. Creating and maintaining an up-to-date electronic record of these assets in the form of rich Building Information Models (BIM) can help generate such improvements. New research is being conducted at the University of Cambridge on inexpensive methods for generating object-oriented infrastructure geometry, detecting and mapping visible defects on the resulting BIM, automatically extracting defect spatial measurements, and sensor and sensor data modelling. The results of these methods are further exploited through their application in design for manufacturing and assembly (DfMA), augmented-reality-enabled mobile inspection, and proactive asset protection from accidental damage. Virtualization methods can produce a reliable digital record of infrastructure and enable owners to reliably protect, monitor and maintain the condition of their asset.
Prof. Dr. Mario Vanhoucke is a Full Professor at Ghent University (Belgium), Vlerick Business School (Belgium) and UCL School of Management (University College London, UK). He teaches “Project Management”, “Applied Operations Research” and “Decision Making for Business”. He obtained a Master’s Degree in Business Engineering (1996) and a PhD in Operations Management (2001), and he currently is director of EVM Europe (www.evm-europe.eu) and partner at the company OR-AS (www.or-as.be).
He is responsible for various research projects in the field of Integrated Project Management and Control, which has led to more than 60 papers in international journals, four Project Management books published by Springer, 2 free online books (www.or-as.be/books), three computerized business games and an online learning platform known as PM Knowledge Center (www.pmknowledgecenter.com). His research has received multiple awards, including awards from PMI Belgium (Belgium, 2007), International Project Management Association (Italy, 2008) and the American Accounting Association (USA, 2010) and multiple awards from Belgian companies.
The big data project manager: Academics like what they do and professionals know what they want
Mario Vanhoucke
Ghent University, Belgium
This presentation gives an overview of the past endeavours and the recent trends in integrated project management and control, with a focus on linking scheduling to risk and control management. The presentation will give an overview on the use of project data for research and practice, and will show that the big data hype is for project management restricted to the presence of artificial sets and only one set of empirical projects. However, recent research trends illustrate that the integrated use of empirical data and advanced techniques from artificial intelligence leads to promising results, which might define the path for future research avenues. References to a literature overview of project control will be given to outline the future of the research on integrated project management and control.
