News

Professor Lord Robert Mair, Head of CSIC, contributed to a House of Lords debate taking note of the case for post Covid-19 recovery strategies that will contribute to a fairer, cleaner, and more sustainable economy, held on Thursday 11 June.Opening the debate, Baroness Lady Hayman said: “This crisis offers us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reb…

Academia, government and industry have come together to publish a new white paper, Flourishing Systems, calling for a fundamental change in how we view and run our nation’s infrastructure in the face of climate change and the socio-economic recovery from Covid-19. The central ideas in the paper are simple and radical: that the purpose of infrastruc…

Dr Ioannis Brilakis, Director of the Department’s Construction Information Technology (CIT) Lab group (part of the Laing O’Rourke Centre for Construction Engineering and Technology) and visiting Professor Rafael Sacks, have been awarded grant funding to enhance building progress monitoring and quality control through Digital Building Twins.​This €6…

A new article has been published by Infrastructure Intelligence. Written by Didem Gurdur Broo and Jennifer Schooling, this article suggests that if we applied future thinking, scenario building, and foresight activities to imagine and understand the future ahead of us, and if we proactively sought to adopt emerging technologies, and re-evaluate pro…

Researchers are contributing to a study to understand the possible post-pandemic futures for the built environment.In an effort to raise awareness of different future-alternatives, as well as of the possibility that these future alternatives can be shaped by different strategies that we can start to work on today, a group from CDBB, including data …

Modelling has been at the front and centre of the UK government’s coronavirus response. The past few weeks has seen mainstream media outlets bombarding the general public with constant news about different models developed by various research groups – and the diversity of scenarios and projections these models produce based on the underlying data a…

The first-ever video-conference Digital Cities for Change (DC2) seminar brought together research students and academics to consider ethnographic approaches to infrastructure and impact. The series of seminars usually takes place at the Civil Engineering Building, at the West Cambridge Site of the University of Cambridge but the current pandemic le…

The SAFEWAY project, a GIS-based infrastructure management system for optimised response to extreme events on terrestrial transport networks, has been featured in an article by CSIC researchers Dr Ajith Parlikad, Reader in Asset Management, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge and CSIC Investigator, and Dr Georgios Hadjidemetriou, C…

The Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors (CICES) and Engineering Council have announced that CICES has received approval to become a Licensed Member of the Engineering Council and assess its members for professional registration at the grades of Chartered Engineer and Incorporated Engineer. The institution previously held Profession…

A three-year collaborative project to drive a new culture in the construction industry to improve whole-life sustainability and productivity has been featured in Civil Engineering Surveyor, the monthly journal of the Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors.The innovative research is being carried out by Dr John Orr, Lecturer in Concret…

An article titled ‘Future of Rail: Artificial intelligence helps Network Rail’s maintenance regime’ published in New Civil Engineer includes the CSIC award-winning project monitoring a masonry viaduct in Leeds for Network Rail. CSIC's innovative approach to monitoring the health of ageing railway infrastructure won the New Civil Engineer TechFest R…

Dr Didem Gurdur Broo has been awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship to develop a conceptual framework for human-centred sustainable future cyber-physical systems. This fellowship will enable her to undertake a new research project in collaboration with Professor Leifer’s designX research lab at Stanford University. Dr G…

The Turing Talk 2020 by Professor Mark Girolami, Sir Kirby Laing Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Cambridge, Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair, Academic Director of CDBB, and Director of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation Programme on Data Centric Engineering at the Alan Turing Institute, played to full-capacity audiences …

Highlights of the newsletter include this year’s CSIC Partner Strategy Day which brought together partners and academics to discuss pressing industry challenges that CSIC’s future research agenda will seek to address. In other news: one CSIS Research Associate makes the case for understanding data to win the AI race; an underground farming projects…

Head of CSIC, Professor Lord Robert Mair, drew attention to the need for and benefits of innovation in a speech at the House of Lords during a debate about the Report from the Economic Affairs Committee Rethinking High Speed 2 (6th Report, Session 2017-19, HL Paper 359) this month.Drawing attention to the three principal areas of concern for HS2 as…