News Archive 2022-2021
2022
Prof Ioannis Brilakis receives two awards from European Council on Computing in Construction (EC3)
Many congratulations to Ioannis for this recognition.
About EC3 and the awards
The European Council on Computing in Construction (EC3) is a recently established society of construction professionals, academics, researchers and national Professional Bodies, aspiring to become the leading European forum in information technology in construction engineering and management.
The Scherer award was established by the EC3 Board in 2018 in honour of Prof Raimar Scherer, founder of the European Conference on Product and Process Modelling (first European community within the Built Environment computing space and a predecessor of EC3), and it is awarded annually to an active or former EC3 officer for outstanding service to the computing community in the context of EC3.
The Thorpe Medal was instituted and endowed in 2018 in honour of Prof Antony Thorpe, a pioneering professor in construction information technology and co-founder of COMIT, the community for mobile computing in construction. It is given in recognition of a paper that contributes to either practical or research aspects of engineering informatics disciplines in the built environment. The practical value of contribution and its impact on engineering informatics practice are key evaluation criteria.
[1] Argyroudis, S.A., Mitoulis, S.A., Chatzi, E., Baker, J.W., Brilakis, I., Gkoumas, K., Vousdoukas, M., Hynes, W., Carluccio, S., Keou, O., Frangopol, M.D. and Linkov, I. (2022) "Digital technologies can enhance global climate resilience of critical infrastructure," Journal of Climate Risk Management, 35,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2021.100387
Submitted by administrator on Thu, 07/07/2022
Future Roads Fellowship programme
Another fantastic opportunity has arisen at the University of Cambridge's Department of Engineering for those interested in taking up a Post-Doctoral Fellowship as part of the Future Roads Fellowships Programme. The closing date for applications is 30 September 2022.
More information on the programme and additional details of the individual project areas can be found at: https://drf.eng.cam.ac.uk
The research will be primarily based on at least one of the following areas, applied to road infrastructure: Digital twins, Smart materials, Data science, Automation and robotics, Sustainability. The key responsibilities and duties are to (1) devise, implement, and test solution(s) that address the aim of the programme; (2) disseminate outcomes and author reports; (3) develop research objectives and proposals for own or joint research; (4) conduct individual and collaborative research; (5) write up research work for presentation and publication. In addition, the researcher will be expected to (1) attend secondments with industrial and academic partners;(2) attend the programme's training sessions; (3) Report to and present research methods and outcomes in management meetings and annual workshops; (4) plan the use of research resources, laboratories and workshops as appropriate; (5) plan and manage own research activity in collaboration with others.
The skills, qualifications and experience required to perform the role are (1) A PhD degree (2) Specialist knowledge with sufficient breadth/depth in one or more of the areas relevant to the Future Roads programme. (3) Good communication skills. Applicants do not need to have postdoctoral experience. However, evidence of having fulfilled all requirements for a PhD degree must be supplied on application, either through supply of a PhD certificate or confirmation letter from the awarding institution.
Applicants must be available to start their fellowship as close as possible to the planned cohort start date in April 2023. They also must comply with the MSCA Mobility rule (explained in the Guide for Applicants on the programme website (https://drf.eng.cam.ac.uk)).
Salary will be in the region of £38,498 + additional allowances.
Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available for 36 months in the first instance.
Once an offer of employment has been accepted, the successful candidate will be required to undergo a health assessment.
For more information and how to apply, please click here.
Submitted by administrator on Sun, 03/07/2022
Digital Roads of the Future Initiative - Senior Project Manager Vacancy
Are you interested in becoming a Senior Project Manager at the University of Cambridge? We are seeking an experienced Senior Project Manager who will be responsible for providing high-level project management and support to the Future Roads Fellowships project (FUTUREROADS) as part of the Digital Roads of the Future (DRF) initiative, by taking the lead role in the management and coordination of various project activities.
FUTUREROADS is a 60 months project that will offer 27 outstanding fellows 36-month fellowships linked to the project's thematic areas; digital twins, data science, smart materials, automation and robotics, and sustainability, all in the context of the roads network. The project is funded in part by the European Commission's MSCA COFUND programme, Costain Ltd and Highways England.
The successful candidate will support the DRF Programme Manager, the Principal Investigator (PI), the Steering Committee, and the Supervisory Board, with the task of acting as intermediary between all parties, and will liaise with senior academic colleagues in the DRF initiative, centres, consortia and other cross-disciplinary research partners at Cambridge to develop a robust strategy for collaborative and leading-edge research.
The closing date for applications is Monday 4 July 2022
For more details and how to apply please click here.
Submitted by administrator on Tue, 21/06/2022
Open position for a Senior Research Associate in Digital Twins (Fixed Term)
Applications are invited for a Senior Research Associate in Digital Twins in the Department of Engineering, to work on the Digital Roads of the Future (DRF) initiative.
The key responsibilities and duties are to provide technical leadership and coordination to the DRF initiative via research advancement in Digital Twins within its existing grants; authoring new grant proposals; authoring publications and disseminating the initiative's outcomes; teaching and learning support; administration, financial management, planning and organisation; staff management, training, and supervising; and internal and external networking, while constantly upholding the university's values.
The skills, qualifications and experience required to perform the role are: (i) having obtained a PhD degree in any relevant engineering or science discipline, or architecture; (ii) possessing significant previous academic experience related to Digital Twins for infrastructure or the built environment as Research Associate or equivalent; (iii) possessing a relevant and very strong academic track record with peer-reviewed journal publications in top journals or patents, with some evidence of preparation of successful proposals; (iii) possessing previous project and financial management experience; (iv) possessing excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available for 40 months in the first instance or until 31 March 2027, whichever comes the soonest.
CLOSING DATE: 15 July 2022
For further information and how to apply, please visit https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/35340/
Submitted by administrator on Thu, 16/06/2022
2021
Digital Roads of the Future Initiative - Programme Director Vacancy
Programme Director
We are seeking a Programme Director, based in West Cambridge, who will lead the Digital Roads of the Future (DRF) initiative and will be responsible for the planning, development, management, and delivery of all aspects of the DRF initiative and its two main pillars; the EPSRC Digital Roads (DR) Prosperity Partnership programme, and the Future Roads (FR) fellowships programme.
The DR programme is an £8.6 mil 5-year EPSRC Prosperity Partnership grant. It is led by one Academic and two Industry Principal Investigators and supported by three Academic and five Industry Co-Investigators. Aside from the Programme Director, DR is also staffed with a Project Manager, a Principal Research Associate, four Industrial Researchers, four Senior Research Associates, and twelve PhD students. The FR programme is a £5.9 mil EC MSCA COFUND grant. It is led by one Academic Principal Investigator and supported by four Academic Co-Investigators. It is staffed with two Programme Managers and 27 post-doctoral fellows.
The Programme Director will be supported by the DR Programme's Project Manager and the Future Roads Programme's two Programme Managers. The Programme Director will also liaise closely with other Departmental academic and administrative staff.
Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available until 31 March 2027 in the first instance.
For more details and to appy: NM28667 - Programme Director - https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/31981/
Submitted by administrator on Mon, 08/11/2021
Principal Research and Senior Research Associate Vacancies in Smart Materials, Digital Twins, Data Science and Automations Robotics
We are recruiting a Principal Research Associate (equivalent to Research Associate Professor) and four Senior Research Associates (equivalent to Research Assistant Professors) to co-lead a team of fifty-plus researchers who are working on a £14.5 million Digital Roads of the Future (DRF) initiative.
The PRA will share overall responsibility with Dr Ioannis Brilakis, whilst the SRAs will each co-lead a team of twelve-plus Research Associates and PhD students in:
Digital Twins with Dr Ioannis Brilakis
Data Science with Professor Mark Girolami
Smart Materials with Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa
Automation Robotics with Professor Fumiya Iida
We are looking for candidates with significant research experience as an academic or SRA (for the PRA vacancy) / RA (for the SRA vacancies). We will also be separately advertising DRF post-doctoral fellowship opportunities for recent PhD graduates in December.
For more details on the vacancies, see links below:
NM28279 - Principal Research Associate in Digital Roads https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/31547/
NM28208 - Senior Research Associate in Automation & Robotics https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/31471/
NM28211 - Senior Research Associate in Data Science https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/31474/
NM28212 - Senior Research Associate in Digital Twins https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/31475/
NM28215 - Senior Research Associate in Smart Materials https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/31478/
Submitted by administrator on Mon, 27/09/2021
A fully funded PhD studentship is now available
The project is a fully funded 4-year EPSRC Industrial CASE PhD Studentship, commencing on 1st October 2021, to investigate methods for generating Digital Twins of roads.
The aim of EPSRC Industrial CASE awards is to provide PhD students with a first-class training experience both in academic and non-academic partner organizations. This project is co-sponsored by Ordnance Survey (OS), a world-leading organisation specializing in surveying the built environment. The work will make use of OS’ extensive visual and spatial datasets of the UK road network collected with unmanned aerial vehicles and state-of-the-art deep learning methods to provide semantic meaning to the raw data and generate Digital Twins of the road network.
The project seeks to better understand the challenges with large scale digital transformation of the built environment. One challenge is in managing big data; the complexity and sheer size of datasets that cover thousands of square miles. Another challenge is understanding what the desired semantic meaning is in the context of road infrastructure and describing it in machine friendly language suitable for training deep learning algorithms. The project will employ a variety of algorithms to manage the data size and complexity and extract semantically meaningful entities suitable for generating reliable Digital Twins.
The project will be jointly supervised by Dr Ioannis Brilakis in the Construction IT group of the Civil Engineering Division at the Department of Engineering, and Dr Stefano Cavazzi from OS.
Applicants should have (or expect to obtain by the start date) at least a good 2.1 degree in an Engineering or related subject.
Deadline was on 30th May 2021.
If you have any questions about this vacancy please contact: Dr I. Brilakis (ib340@cam.ac.uk) for queries of a technical nature related to the role or the CIT Administrator (cit-admin@construction.cam.ac.uk) for the application process.
Submitted by administrator on Fri, 30/04/2021
A postdoc opportunity in Construction Information Technology sponsored by the EC H2020 OMICRON
A 36-month position is being advertised for a Research Assistant/Associate in the Department of Engineering to work on the project titled "OMICRON: Towards a more automated and optimised maintenance, renewal and upgrade of roads by means of robotised technologies and intelligent decision support tools".
OMICRON is a Horizon 2020 funded research project whose goal is to develop an Intelligent Road Asset Management Platform to address the needs of road design, construction and maintenance processes. The Cambridge postdoc will take the leading role in the data structures and architecture of road network Digital Twins, and how to generate them.
The key responsibilities and duties are to: devise, implement, and test solutions for the OMICRON project; disseminate the outcomes of the OMICRON project and author reports to the project's sponsor; develop proposals for own or joint research; conduct individual and collaborative research; present and publish research work; and manage own research and administrative activities, with guidance if required. The post holder may also: assist in the supervision of students and provide limited supervision/instruction to classes. The post holder will also be expected to: liaise with the OMICRON consortium partners and staff; liaise with colleagues and students; build internal and external contacts; administer meetings of the OMICRON consortium; plan the use of research resources; plan and manage own research activity; and contribute to planning of joint research projects led by the principal investigator.
Deadline is on 30th April 2021.
If you have any questions about this vacancy please contact: Dr I. Brilakis (ib340@cam.ac.uk) for queries of a technical nature related to the role or the CIT Administrator (cit-admin@construction.cam.ac.uk) for the application process.
Submitted byadnistrator on Tue, 13/04/2021
Open position for Research Assistant/Associate in the project BIM2TWIN
One position is being advertised, under the Horizon 2020 project "BIM2TWIN: Optimal Construction Management & Production Control".
- https://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/28140/
The key responsibilities and duties are to: devise, implement, and test solutions for the BIM2TWIN project; disseminate the outcomes of the BIM2TWIN project and author reports to the project's sponsor; develop proposals for own or joint research; conduct individual and collaborative research; present and publish research work; and manage own research and administrative activities, with guidance if required. The post holder may also: assist in the supervision of students and provide limited supervision/instruction to classes. The post holder will also be expected to: liaise with the BIM2TWIN consortium partners and staff; liaise with colleagues and students; build internal and external contacts; administer meetings of the BIM2TWIN consortium; plan the use of research resources; plan and manage own research activity; and contribute to planning of joint research projects led by the principal investigator.
You can find more about the project here.
Deadline is on the 16th February 2021.
If you have any questions about this vacancy please contact: Dr I. Brilakis (ib340@cam.ac.uk) for queries of a technical nature related to the role or Dr Maria Carvalho (cit-admin@construction.cam.ac.uk) for the application process.
Submitted by administrator on Tue, 02/02/2021
CIT lab director ranked in the Top 2% most-cited scientists in the world
A study from the Stanford University that looked at publications published between 1996-2019 identified Dr Brilakis as being in the Top 2% most cited researchers in the world. This study covered around 7 million researchers that were categorized into 22 major scientific fields, and 176 sub-fields.
In the sub-field of Building & Contruction, Dr Brilakis ranks 343 worldwide in terms of citations of his work.
Dr Brilakis' research interests lie broadly in the field of construction engineering with a focus on construction automation and information technologies, and is an author of over 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings.
Submitted by administrator on Tue, 02/02/2021
Funding secured for major digital overhaul of European road network
Researchers from the Construction Information Technology (CIT) Laboratory will lead on the digitalisation of the European road network as part of a collaborative project to improve road safety, increase capacity and reduce maintenance costs.
Dr Ioannis Brilakis, CIT lab director and Laing O'Rourke Reader in Construction Engineering, will join a consortium of 16 partners from seven EU countries to work on the 5,000,000€ Horizon 2020-funded project titled OMICRON over the course of the next four years.
The overall goal of OMICRON is to develop an Intelligent Road Asset Management Platform to address the needs of road design, construction and maintenance processes, unifying and coordinating innovative technologies from robotics to digitalisation tools, with a particular focus on road Digital Twins.
Dr Brilakis and his team have made pioneering scientific advances in the ‘twinning’ infrastructure field. They will now take the lead on the design and integration of a road Digital Twin and intelligent decision support system (DSS) as part of the OMICRON project. This will enable the automation and optimised maintenance of a number of road management tasks that currently still have a high labour component.
The CIT Laboratory will also take the lead on enhancing vehicle inspection technologies in an attempt to capture better visual information of the condition of road infrastructures – a procedure normally carried out manually, supported by specific machinery, which is very costly and has limited precision.
The task will involve the spatial projection of thermal data for visual inspection and will use computer vision-based algorithms in order to process the data captured by the system. The task will involve combining information (e.g. high-quality images) gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – such as that of bridges and signalling that cannot be captured easily from the ground – with information gathered by ground vehicles – of the pavement and surrounding road area, for example – and integrating it in the Digital Twin.
The OMICRON project is expected to have an impact in the industrialisation and increase in the performance of roads, including the improvement of workers safety.
Dr Brilakis said: “Our goal is to set the foundations for generating, updating, and exploiting Digital Twins for road network maintenance and operations management. This refers to detailed, object oriented Digital Twins that capture both the 'as is' spatial and visual properties of road assets and interpret them in a manner appropriate for its intended use.”
(News item based on the Department of Engineering news article)
Submitted by administrator on Thu, 07/01/2021