Upcoming Seminars
Wildfire Engineering: Integrating Models with Data to Advance Solutions
May 21, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Hamed Ebrahimian
Wildland fires are a critical part of a healthy ecosystem. However, the rapid expansion of the wildland-urban interface, coupled with climate change and human activities, has dramatically increased wildfire hazards in recent decades. Today, wildfires rank among the most significant natural threats to social, economic, ecological, and infrastructure systems. This presentation introduces the wildfire challenge to the engineering community and highlights our team’s recent advancements in wildfire simulation, data analysis, and risk assessment.
Simulating wildfires is a complex, multi-physics, and multi-scale process essential for both pre-fire risk assessment and active-fire emergency response. This presentation provides an overview of state-of-the-art wildland fire modeling techniques, emphasizing our contributions to fuel characterization and modeling fire spotting. To address the challenges of collecting observational wildfire data, we have developed a deep learning method that enhances the spatial resolution of satellite data. This new development supports the integration of computational models and data, advancing capabilities for wildfire digital twinning and enabling near real-time wildfire monitoring for emergency response.
Additionally, the presentation outlines the development of a probabilistic wildfire risk assessment framework, inspired by decades of progress in earthquake risk engineering. This framework accounts for uncertainties across different systems to quantify wildfire risk as the probability of loss. Finally, we explore key technical challenges in wildfire monitoring, simulation, and data assimilation and present a forward-looking vision for wildfire engineering research. The objective is to engage the engineering community in addressing this critical and evolving challenge through innovative contributions.
Past Seminars
Turning Disaster Into Knowledge
February 27, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Jonathan D. Bray
Advancing hazard-resistant design demands an understanding of what happens when a disaster occurs. Documenting and sharing the key lessons learned from extreme events around the world contributes significantly to advancing research and practice in hazards engineering. Unanticipated observations from major events often define new research directions.
Framework for Extracting Causal Information using Data from Disparate Structural Experiments
February 22, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Professor Henry V. Burton
The physical laboratory experiment is a primary tool in advancing our fundamental understanding of structural behavior under seismic loading. For a given project, the results from one or a small set of physical experiments are used to understand how different structural properties or design strategies affect behavior.
Advanced Numerical modelling and Structural Health Monitoring with STKO and OpenSees
February 08, 2023 - 3:00 pm
Speaker: Guido Camata
Nonlinear Finite Element Analyses (NLFEA) can be used to accurately assess the behavior of complex structural details and systems in cases where standards cannot provide reliable verification or computational models
Spatial correlation in ground motion intensities: Measurement, prediction, and seismic risk implications
February 06, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Jack W. Baker
The amplitude of ground shaking during an earthquake varies spatially, due to location-to-location differences in wave propagation, attenuation, and source- and site-effects. These variations have important implications for impacts to infrastructure systems and other distributed assets. This presentation will provide an overview of efforts to quantify spatial correlations in amplitudes, via past earthquakes and numerical simulations.
The Role of Emerging Technologies To Realize Smart Infrastructure
February 01, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Professor Kenichi Soga
Design, construction, maintenance and upgrading of civil engineering infrastructure requires fresh thinking to minimize use of materials, energy and labor. This can only be achieved by understanding the actual performance of the infrastructure, both during its construction and throughout its design life, through innovative monitoring. Advances in sensor systems and data analytics offer intriguing possibilities to radically alter methods of condition assessment and monitoring of infrastructure.
Multi-scale Computational Geomechanics for Energy and Climate
January 25, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Chloé Arson
Landscapes encode the history of the climate. For example, saprolite, the intermediate material between rock and soil, plays a critical role in the evolution of topography, nutrient supply, landslide hazards, and the global carbon cycle. The subsurface also bears resources used for the production of energy and construction materials. It is thus important to assess the response of soils, rocks and other geomaterials to a varying climate and to increasing societal demands.
Building Big Underground – Modern Challenges in meeting the demands of expanding the Urban Environment
January 18, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Luis Piek
The share of the world’s population living in cities is expected to rise to 80% by 2050. To meet the current and future transportation demands while minimizing disturbance to existing infrastructure, City municipalities are expanding their subterranean networks, requiring longer, larger, and more extensive underground networks. Additional challenges include crossing active faults, meeting high seismic demands, and large excavations adjacent to tall buildings and their interaction with existing and future tunnels.
What We Learned from Parallel Linear and Non-linear Analyses
January 11, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Ariel Creagh
When designing a structure, a critical decision is whether the lateral force resisting system will be developed using linear or non-linear analysis techniques. On our new design, laboratory research projects at UCSF, the Technical Performance Criteria requires us to do both analyses in parallel. Can you predict what are the differences in the overall design of the lateral force resisting system depending on which type of analysis is used?
Building Big Underground – Modern Challenges in meeting the demands of expanding the Urban Environment
November 28, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Luis Piek
The share of the world’s population living in cities is expected to rise to 80% by 2050. To meet the current and future transportation demands while minimizing disturbance to existing infrastructure, City municipalities are expanding their subterranean networks, requiring longer, larger, and more extensive underground networks. Additional challenges include crossing active faults, meeting high seismic demands, and large excavations adjacent to tall buildings and their interaction with existing and future tunnels.
A Smart Train Concept for High-Speed Ultrasonic Monitoring of Railroad Tracks
November 21, 2022 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Diptojit Datta
Every year, the railroad industry transports over 10,000 billion freight ton-kilometers and 3000 billion passenger-kilometers around the world. Internal defects in rails and degrading ballast support conditions for railroad ties are some of the major causes of train derailment related accidents. Timely detection of such defects is of critical interest to the railroad maintenance community for ensuring the reliability of the railroad infrastructure.