Keynote Speakers

Prof Nashwan Dawood

Brief Biography

 

Professor Dawood (Bsc, MPhil, PhD) is currently Director for the Centre for Construction Innovation & Research, University of Teesside and Cecil M Yuill Professor of Construction management & IT.

 

Prof Dawood has spent many years as an academic and researcher within the field of construction management and the application of IT in the construction process. This has ranged across a number of research topics including information technologies and systems (4D,VR,Integrated databases), risk management, and business processes. This has resulted in over 170 published papers in refereed international journal and conferences, and research grants from British Council, Industry, Engineering Academy , EPSRC, DTI and construction industry companies, totalling about £2,500,000. Final reports of the last three EPSRC grants received ‘Tending to Outstanding' peer assessment review from EPSRC.

Professor Dawood originated the CONVR conference series (Construction Applications of Virtual Reality: Current Initiatives and Future Challenges) and CONVR 2008 will be held in KL, Malaysia.

 

Prof Dawood is a visiting professor to Aalborg University, Denmark, Public works Research Institute PWRI Japan and Miyagi University , Japan and IIUM, Malaysia. Prof Dawood is a member EPSRC (UK Government grant agency) Peer Review College.

Prof. Nobuyoshi Yabuki

Brief Biography

 

Prof. Nobuyoshi Yabuki is a Professor in the Division of Sustainable Energy and Environmental Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Japan. He leads the Environmental Design and Information Technology Laboratory there. Before joining Osaka University, he was an associate professor at Muroran Institute of Technology from 1999 to 2008. He worked for the Electric Power Development Co., Ltd., from 1982 to 1999. He obtained his Ph.D. (1992) and M.S. (1989) in civil engineering at Stanford University, USA, as a Fulbright Scholarship recipient. He obtained his B.E. (1982) in civil engineering at the University of Tokyo.

 

Prof. Yabuki’s research interests include development of product models, Building Information Modeling (BIM), application of VR and AR to civil and building engineering, 4D CAD, RFID and sensors for inspection and monitoring of structures, knowledge discovery from large amount of sensor and product model data, etc. He has authored over one hundred journal and international conference papers. He leads the Civil Engineering Committee of buildingSMART IAI Japan and Cyber & Real Infrastructure Modeling Sub-Committee of Japan Society of Civil Engineers (JSCE). Prof. Yabuki is a member of JSCE, ASCE, IEEE, ACM, AIJ, VR Society of Japan, Japan Society of Kansei Engineering, etc.

Prof. Lucio Soibelman

Brief Biography

 

Professor Soibelman obtained his Bachelor and Masters Degrees from the
Civil Engineering Department of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande
do Sul, Brazil. He worked as a construction manager for 10 years before
moving in 1993 to the US where he obtained in 1998 his PhD in Civil
Engineering Systems from the Civil and Environmental Engineering
Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1998
he started as an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at
Urbana Champaign. In 2004 he moved as an Associate Professor to the
Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon
University (CMU). In 2008 he was promoted at CMU to Professor.

 

During the last 10 years he focused his research on advanced data acquisition, management, visualization, and mining for construction and operations of advanced infrastructure systems. He published over 85 books, book chapters, journal papers, conference articles, and reports and performed research with over $ 4.5 million in funding from NSF (NSF career award and several other NSF grants), NASA, DOE, IBM, Bosch, IDOT, RedZone Robotics among many others funding agencies. His areas of interest are: use of information technology for economic development, information technology support for construction management, process integration during the development of large-scale engineering systems, information logistics, artificial intelligence, data mining, knowledge discovery, image reasoning, text mining, machine learning, advanced infrastructure systems, sensors, streaming data, and Multi-reasoning Mechanisms.