Senior Research Associates

Dr Stephen Green was a Research Assistant Professor at the Division of Civil

Engineering of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

He led the Data Science team in the Digital Roads of the Future (DRF) initiative.

Prior to this, he was a post-doctoral research associate in Institute for

Manufacturing (IfM), University of Cambridge. 

Prof Xu was a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Engineering

at the University of Cambridge. He led the Automation and Robotics team in the

Digital Roads of the Future initiative. Prior to this, he was a post-doctoral research

associate in Prof Richard Buswell’s group at Loughborough University to deliver

two EPSRC-funded significant projects (worth £2.2mil) that delivered the next

generation of 3D Concrete Printing technology-Hybrid Concrete Printing.  

Dr Kelly was a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, where

he has been contributing to the Digital Roads project since June 2024. Tom is a

research scientist and software engineer in subjects around graphics, machine

learning, and urban environments. He does things like generative AI, procedural

modelling, software engineering, and creating synthetic data. His expertise in

digital and computational methodologies is backed by a prolific career in both

academia and industry. 

Prof Wei was a Senior Research Associate at the Division of Civil  Engineering  

at the University of Cambridge. He led the Digital Twin team in the Digital Roads

of the Future (DRF) initiative. Prior to the University of Cambridge, he was an

associate professor at Dalian University of Technology, China, where he focused

his research on digital twins and model- based system assurance for robotic and

autonomous systems.

Professor Georgios Hadjidemetriou was a Senior Research Associate at the

Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. He led the Data Science

team in the Digital Roads of the Future (DRF) initiative. Georgios obtained a

PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Cyprus, in collaboration with

Georgia Institute of Technology and University of Cambridge.

Embedded Senior Researchers

Dr Taha. was an industrial research fellow at Costain plc based at the

University of Cambridge. Hussameldin obtained his PhD in 2018 from Heriot-Watt

university/Scotland/UK in civil engineering. His work focused on developing self-

sensing cementitious materials which can sense damage and repair by using

different extrinsic and intrinsic sensing methods. In addition, he has extensive

experience in the construction industry particularly in highways construction and

pavement materials.

Post-doctoral Fellows

Dr Yue Xie was a Marie Curie Future Roads Fellow at the University of Cambridge,

specialising in AI and multi-agent systems for future road automation. She did

her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Adelaide in 2021 and has

experience as a Postdoctoral Fellow at CSIRO and the University of Adelaide.

Her research spans AI, bio-inspired optimization, mining engineering, public

health, and soft robotics. Her current focus is on integrating AI and information

theory for vehicle-road coordination.

Dr Varun was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Future Roads Fellow at the University of

Cambridge. He obtained his joint PhD from IIT Madras, India, and UTS,

Australia, where he studied the computer vision for monitoring construction

projects. His research area focuses on Automation in Construction, Digital Twins,

and Construction Management.

Dr Xu’s research is focused on the theme of sustainability and data

science in smart construction of future roads. She completed her PhD in

construction management and technology at the University of Hong Kong. 

Her research cover data science for construction sustainability, smart

construction and facility management, construction digital transformation,

human- organisation -technology fit, and human-machine augmentation in

construction engineering.

Dr Abdulali completed his PhD degree with the Department of Computer Science

and Engineering, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea. In 2021, he joined

Bio-inspired Robotics Lab in the Department of Engineering of the University of

Cambridge as a research associate. In 2022, Arsen was awarded a three-year

fellowship by the Future Roads program funded by the European Union’s Horizon

2020 Research and Innovation Programme  under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie

grant. 

Judith Fauth was Marie-Sklodowska-Curie postdoc fellow at the University of

Cambridge. Before she joined Cambridge, she was postdoctoral researcher

at the Technische Universität Wien and researcher in the research project iECO at

RIB Software GmbH in Germany. Judith completed several research stays abroad

such as at the University of Southern California, Fraunhofer Italia, and Technion -

Israel Institute of Technology. She obtained her doctorate in engineering from

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar  from the department of construction engineering

and management in 2021. 

Professor Yiming Zhang was a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Future Roads Fellow at the

University of Cambridge. He received his PhD degrees in Civil Engineering at

Monash University and Southeast University. Throughout his professional career,

Dr Zhang has had extensive industrial experience and written more than twenty

well-recognized publications regarding developing probabilistic machine-learning

methods to address engineering problems from a data-driven perspective. 

Prof Buuveibaatar was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Future Roads Fellow at the

Division of Civil Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Prior to Cambridge, 

he gained substantial experience in operating and managing highway asset data

and information management systems /databases as a postdoctoral researcher

at the Korean Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology. He has

particular research interests and focuses on conceptualising and implementing

smart road management in the highways industry. 

Dr Wang was a Research Associate working with Prof Ioannis Brilakis. His

role was to lead a work package for the AEGIR project, funded by the European

Commission, and assisted some parts of BIM2TWIN and OMICRON projects. He

is interested in computer vision and robotic technologies and the application of

these technologies. His research focuses on localization, mapping, multi-sensor

fusion, Nerf-based SLAM, point cloud processing, and 3D visual learning.

Professor Shuyan Li was a research associate working with Ioannis Brilakis. She

led a work package of BIM2TWIN project, funded by European Commission

H2020. She was broadly interested in computer vision and machine learning. Her 

research focuses on representation learning, point cloud processing and transfer

learning. In January 2022, she got her doctor’s degree in the Department of

Automation at Tsinghua University.

Prof Chen was sponsored by the OMICRON project, funded by Horizon 2020. Her

research project aimed to develop Road Digital Twin Tools and an Intelligent Asset

Management Platform to address the needs of road design, construction and

maintenance processes. Weiwei holds a doctoral degree in Civil Engineering from

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Ms Liu was a research assistant at the Construction Information Technology

Laboratory of the Laing O’Rourke Centre. Her research interests lied in exploiting

robotic automation and intelligent sensing technologies for infrastructure

engineering. At the University of Cambridge, her research was funded by the

BIM2TWIN project and focused on capturing and processing, visual data of

infrastructure scenes intelligently.

Dr Hong obtained her PhD form the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her

research interest lies in smart construction management. Her projects at CIT

was in finding time- and risk-efficient construction method patterns from historic

projects to support schedulers producing quality planning more confident and

productive.

Prof Haiyan Xie joined the Construction Information Technology Laboratory in 

2019. Sally investigated how scheduling information should be effectively

communicated at the project and organisational level. Her research focused on

Smart City, Big Data Analytics, AI in Construction and Operation, Simulation and

Control, and Innovative Technology in Construction Engineering and 

Management. 

Dr Belsky was a research associate in Laing O'Rourke Centre working with Prof 

Ioannis Brilakis and Prof Campbell Middleton on the Innovate UK project: Digitally

Enabling the Design for Manufacture, Assembly and Maintenance of Bridges. He

obtained his MSc and PhD at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and his

research interests include Building Information Modeling (BIM), information

exchanges and knowledge acquisition.

Prof Kim was a research associate at the CIT Group of the Laing O'Rourke

Centre. He worked on a project 'Digitally Enabling the Design for Manufacture,

Assembly and Maintenance of Bridges' with Dr Michael Belsky, Dr Ioannis Brilakis,

and Prof. Campbell Middleton. He holds a PhD Degree in Civil & Environmental

Engineering from both KAIST and The Hong Kong University of Science and

Technology. He was a post-doctoral researcher of Applied Engineering Institution

at KAIST.

Prof Juan Manuel Davila Delgado was a research associate at the Centre for

Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) and collaborated with the CIT 

Laboratory of the Laing  O'Rourke Centre. He obtained his PhD at Eindhoven

University of Technology and his research was focused on development of open

BIM standards for structural monitoring and damage assessment of existing

infrastructure assets.

Dr Patraucean was a RA at the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and

Construction (CSIC). Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Ecole

Polytechnique-Inria, Paris, collaborating with Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau and

ENS Cachan. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science at the Institut National

Polytechnique de Toulouse, France. Her research focused on shape detection and

recognition in images and 3D point clouds, using probabilistic robust methods and

geometric invariance.

Professor Dai worked at the CIT group from Fall 2010 until Summer 2012. His

research interests were reciprocal reconstruction and recognition for as-built

modelling of infrastructure. He was working on the NSF sponsored reciprocal 3D

reconstruction project for modelling of construction facilities.

Professor Koch worked at the CIT group from Spring 2010 until Summer 2010. He

oversaw the synthesis and validation activities of the NSF sponsored vision

tracking project. In parallel, he initiated a new project on pavement condition

assessment systems through machine vision.

PhD students

Dr Viktor Drobnyi was a PhD Student in Engineering and an ESR in the CBIM

project sponsored by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie foundation. Viktor holds a

Master's Degree from the Technical University of Munich. His PhD research was

focused on the automation of infrastructure object detection of buildings on raw

sensor data, including point cloud data & image data.

Dr Zhqi Hu was a PhD Student in Engineering at the Construction Information

Technology group of the Laing O'Rourke Centre on a Marie Sklodowska-Curie

Studentship. Zhiqi holds a Master's Degree in Intelligent Building from Hong Kong

University of Science and Technology. Her work experience includes IT, Venture

Capital, and Real Estate companies. Her research project for the PhD focuses on

updating model geometry from registered point cloud and image datasets. 

Dr Trzeciak was a PhD student in Engineering sponsored by BP, GeoSLAM, Laing

O'Rourke, Topcon Positioning Group, and Trimble. He worked in the industry, as a

structural engineer at BuroHappold Engineering in Berlin, and academia, as a

research associate at the Technical University of Munich. His PhD focused on

improving long-distance 3D mobile mapping of large-scale infrastructure assets in

near real-time.

Dr Pan was a PhD doctoral candidate of Technical University of Munich under

Prof Ioannis Brilakis's TUM fellowship. His expertise is in artificial intelligence,

particularly deep learning and image processing. His research focused on

developing robust methods for creating digital twins of the built environment

using AI methods such as deep learning to interpret point cloud data.

Dr Agapaki was a PhD Candidate in Engineering sponsored by EPSRC and AVEVA

and she graduated in 2020. She was a visiting scholar for a large scale centrifuge

experiment at UC Davis on the same project. Her research project for her PhD 

focused on the generation of as-is geometric Building Information Models (BIM) of

industrial facilities using novel approaches.

Dr Lu was a PhD. Candidate at the Construction Information Technology group of

Laing O'Rourke and she graduated in 2019. She holds a Diplôme d'Ingénieur in

Civil Engineering from National Institutes of Applied Sciences of Toulouse, France.

Her research interests focus on as-is Bridge Information Modeling (BrIM) using

point cloud data. 

Dr Hüthwohl did his PhD at the Construction Information Technology group

of the Laing O'Rourke Centre and he graduated in 2019. His research topic was

on image-based automated bridge assessment based on enriched BIM models.

The topic aims to assist inspection tasks on greater infrastructure elements like

bridges. 

Dr Konstantinou was a PhD candidate in the Construction Information Technology

group of the Laing O'Rourke Centre. She is a civil engineer with a 5-year of

professional experience in surveillance and structural engineering of steel and

concrete structures. Her research project was in collaboration with Laing O'Rourke

and focused in investigating the possible applications of computer vision methods

in automating the measurement of labour productivity at construction sites. 

Major Vick gained a PhD at the Construction Information Technology group of the

Laing O’Rourke Centre at the University of Cambridge in 2018. He has 13 years of

experience as a Civil Engineering Officer in the United States Air Force, where he

most recently served as an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at the United

States Air Force Academy. His research focused on the use of computer vision

techniques to enhance civil infrastructure progress monitoring at remote and

dangerous locations. 

Dr Kopsida did her PhD at the Construction Information Technology group of

the Laing O'Rourke Centre, as a Marie Curie fellow. Her research was focused on

Automated Progress Monitoring using BIM & a Mobile Device in an AR

Environment. The topic aimed to assist inspection and progress monitoring for

interior activities in a construction project. 

Dr Nguyen did her PhD at the Construction Information Technology group

of the Laing O'Rourke Centre and graduated in 2017. She is a civil engineer by

training with extensive knowledge and expertise within the computer vision and

machine learning domains. Her research focused on collaboration with Transport

for London investigating methods to detect and prevent bridge strike occurrences.

Dr Anagnostopoulos did his PhD at the Construction Information Technology

group of the Laing O'Rourke Centre as a Marie Curie fellow and graduated in

2018. Ioannis graduated from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 2013

with a major in Transportation Engineering and Construction Management.

His research focused on Object Classification using Random Forests &

Contextual Reasoning for Modelling of Industrial Facilities. 

Dr Radopoulou did her PhD at the Construction Information Technology group

of the Laing O’Rourke Centre and graduated in 2016. She started her research at

the Georgia Institute of Technology and continued it at Cambridge University. Her

research topic was Pavement Condition Monitoring using a Parking Camera &

Dynamic Sensor Data. She aimed to create a novel framework that is capable of

automatically detecting and classifying different pavement defects.

Dr Zhang was a research assistant at the CIT group and he graduated in 2016.

He was a PhD candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research was 

on Primitives Extraction & Bridge Component Detection in Point Cloud Data for

As- Built Modelling and it was part of the NSF sponsored project "Reciprocal

Reconstruction and Recognition for Modelling of Constructed Facilities".

Dr Rashidi completed his PhD at the CIT lab in 2014. His research focused on

Improved Monocular Videogrammetry for Generating 3D Dense Point Clouds of

Built Infrastructure. He developed algorithms for extracting key video frames,

computing the absolute scale of monocular settings and filling gaps and holes on

surfaces of Point Cloud Data.

Dr Fathi obtained his PhD degree at the CIT lab, University of Cambridge in 2013.

His research objective was to solve the 3D reconstruction problems that occur

when trying to get the 3D geometry of the built environment from a moving video

system, such as low accuracy, high percentage of failures, and low utilization of

the environment's intrinsic features. 

Dr Jong-Su Jeon completed his PhD at the CIT lab in 2013. He developed the

framework for the aftershock fragility assessment of RC building structures of

the NSF-sponsored Machine Vision Enhanced Post Earthquake Inspection project.

Dr German completed her PhD at the CIT Lab in 2013. She worked on the NSF

sponsored Machine Vision Enhanced Post Earthquake Inspection project. Her work

focused on creating image-based automated detection algorithms of damage and

damage properties on reinforced concrete columns. In addition, her work included

creating a classification model of damage indices for RC columns based on this

visual damage information.

Dr Park completed his PhD at the CIT lab in 2012. He focused on construction

object classification from video data. His thesis focused on robust 3D tracking

through multiple video region matching, and feature identification and recognition

based on visual pattern recognition models.

Dr Zhu completed his PhD at the CIT lab in 2011. His research was on real-time

concrete damage visual assessment for first responders. His thesis proposed

a novel method that provided first responders with a crude but quick estimate of

the safety of damaged structures. Now he is an Assistant Professor at Concordia

University, Canada.

Staff 

Aimee obtained her MA British Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and

was formerly the International Partnerships Manager at the University of

Southampton in 2021 and Manager of Education and Training at the Drug Safety

 Research Unit in Southampton, UK, in 2022. She was the DRF Programme

Coordinator. Her role coordinated and monitored the operations of the initiative

as part of the management team.

Dr Ariyachandra obtained her PhD in the Construction Information Technology

group at  the University of Cambridge. Her research project for the PhD was

focused on the Automated Generation of Geometric Digital Twins of Existing Rail

Infrastructure. From July 2022 to June 2024, she was the Programme Manager of

Digital Roads of the Future Initiative. She is currently a Lecturer (Assistant

Professor) at the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction (BSSC) at University

College London. 

Ms Sanjana Bushra worked as the DRF Programme Coordinator from July 2022 -

July 2023. 

Dr Anna Hajduk worked as the Programme Manager from September 2021 -

May 2022 for Future Roads Programme.

Katharina Kroczek

Ms Kroczek was Programme Manager for the Future Roads Cofund Fellowship.

She is a qualified project manager having worked in a range of automotive and

mobility sector roles across Europe, and most recently as a management

consultant. Her experience ranges from classic IT project management to legal

compliance within large scale programmes, as well as the development of new

business models.