TRUSS workshop in Dublin

Following a successful workshop in London, TRUSS liaised with the Civil Engineering Research Association of Ireland (CERAI) to host a second workshop in parallel with the Civil and Engineering Research (CERI) conference (29-30 August 2018) chaired by Vikram Pakrashi (UCD). The CERAI was formed for the purpose of promoting civil engineering research and practice in Ireland, and its communication to academics, practitioners and key stakeholders including local and national authorities. CERAI addresses all relevant aspects of the subject of civil engineering systems, including bridges, concrete, other materials, geotechnics and other forms of civil engineering. There are emphasis on applications as well as theory to maintain relevance to both industry and academia. CERAI targets the type of local audience that TRUSS have envisaged the workshops for. For these reasons, the final TRUSS ITN workshop took place from 10:00 to 17:30 on the Wednesday 29th August, concurrently with CERI conference, to attract an Irish audience of interested parties as large as possible. The workshop consisted of fifteen 15-minute long presentations: one by the Project Coordinator introducing the project, followed by a presentation by each of the 14 ESRs. Download flyer on TRUSS Workshop at UCD, Dublin 2018

TRUSS increased its visibility by sponsoring CERI. I.e., the name and logo of the TRUSS ITN project were shown in the opening address, proceedings, brochure and website, and best paper prizes ceremony of the CERI conference. Therefore, a kiosk dedicated to the TRUSS Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN project was made available at the exhibition hall during the two days of the conference. The latter allowed TRUSS workshop to be accessed by more than 220 delegates, giving an opportunity to our ESRs to interact with the attendees beyond the time allocated to their presentations. The 91-page book about the project that is shown below was freely distributed at the TRUSS kiosk.

TRUSS_ITN_Workshop_2018

It is worth noting that Daniel Martinez Cantero (ESR12) was a member of the local organization committee of CERI and that Arturo Gonzalez (PC) was also heavily involved as the leader of one of the conference streams. Additionally, all ESRs submitted papers to the CERI conference to be included in the proceedings, and had the chance to attend presentations by researchers from outside the consortium. There were 150 papers presented at CERI2018 from a broad range of topics in Civil Engineering, including: Bridge Engineering, Concrete Technology, Environmental Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering, Pedagogy in Civil Engineering, Structural Engineering, Timber and Other Civil Engineering Materials. The presentations/papers by TRUSS ESRs had the chance to compete with another 20 papers within the category of “New Frontiers” for two prizes to the best student papers. Each prize included a certificate to the best student paper + €200 + chance to apply for €750 to attend a conference. These prizes were awarded to Siyuan Chen (ESR14), pictured below, and Federico Perrota (ESR13) for their work on “Automated bridge deck evaluation through UAV derived point cloud” and on “A big data approach for investigating the performance of the road infrastructure” respectively.