skip to content

Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction

Transforming infrastructure through smarter information
 

This month’s Smart Infrastructure Blog is by CSIC Academic Director and the Turing’s inaugural Chief Scientist Professor Mark Girolami, who makes the case for data-driven insights and collaboration with industry to enable actionable insights to meet the scientific and societal challenges our critical infrastructure faces.

Titled ‘Making the future: transforming data into insights to deliver value’, Professor Girolami highlights the new market opportunities and business models that have emerged in other engineering sectors which previously recognised the necessity to adopt a data-driven perspective, such as for Rolls-Royce in aerospace.

He writes: “In a similar manner, CSIC has, over the last decade, been pivotal in the comprehensive instrumentation of assets from rail bridges to highways, all now producing data-driven insights into their operating condition.” Transforming data into actionable insight is key and CSIC’s work recognises this. “The research area of Data Science is essential for CSIC to develop the new theory, methods and analytic tools which will provide the data-driven actionable insights to meet the scientific and societal challenges our critical infrastructure faces. It will be the enabler for us to transform data into insight, action, control and policy.”

Highlighting the importance of not neglecting mathematical principles key to understanding the dynamics of an asset – “the fundamental laws distilled by our predecessors in civil engineering”, the blog looks to the future possibilities brought by the synthesis of both mathematical models and informative data, concluding: “CSIC will remain at the vanguard of synthesising models and data which will ultimately deliver value to infrastructure construction and operation and support better and sustainable services on which society depends.”

• Read the full Smart Infrastructure Blog by Professor Girolami here

Latest news

Tongji University and University of Cambridge Forge Stronger Civil Engineering Ties Through Graduate Forum

23 June 2025

The Civil Engineering Division of the Department of Engineering at Cambridge welcomed a distinguished delegation from Tongji University, China, for a week-long graduate forum titled "From Concrete to Code: Civil Engineering in the Digital Era" , held from 17 -20th June 2025. The visit marked a significant milestone in the...

Cambridge Researchers Battle for Summer Research Support in CSIC’s “Dragon’s Den” Event

20 June 2025

CSIC hosted a dynamic and engaging "Dragon’s Den" event this week, where researcher associates and PhD and Master’s students pitched their innovative ideas to a panel of industry experts in the hopes of winning research support for the summer. Held on Wednesday morning 18 June at the University’s Cambridge West site, the...

 

CSIC Social Media

Follow us on:  LinkedIn and BlueSky

Watch our videos on: YouTube