| Anastasios Sextos |
A unique conference on safety and resilience of infrastructure organized by Tianjin University in China. Not only because of the opportunity to visit the ground-breaking National Facility for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NFEES) including a 16m x 20m, 1350t (!), 6DOF shaking table and two smaller underwater ones, but also due to the vibrant discussions and most-engaging final forum.
There, it was evident that building safer against earthquakes is possible today because of the major technological advancements in the last decades, especially in terms of hashtagseismic_isolation, hashtagenergy_dissipation and hashtagsmart_devices for structural response control. hashtagComputer_Science, hashtagSHM and hashtagAI are revolutionizing our discipline, offering amazing opportunities for mitigating seismic risk.
At the same time, perhaps we tend to produce more data than we can currently absorb in a meaningful sense, at least without ensuring an insightful big data management strategy. More importantly, low-income regions (both in the developing and the developed world) fail to implement the high-tech solutions currently available, thus increasing the hashtagresilience_gap across the globe. To address these challenges, the scientific community shall enhance hashtaginternational_collaboration, develop hashtagopen_access_datasets for field and experimental measurements, promote the use of hashtagnew_materials, test novel low-cost solutions at a hashtaglarge_scale and share pragmatic earthquake-resistance practices between earthquake prone regions. These could be the stepping stones of our engineering community so that the human toll we pay every year constantly reduces.
Sincere thanks to the Conference Chairs Prof. L. Xie and Prof. Q. Han, co-Chairs Prof. M. Todorovska and Prof. C. Zhai as well as Prof. Xu and Prof. Y. Chen for an setting up an inspiring event and for the honouring invitation.
School of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering (CADE) – University of Bristol National Technical University of Athens