As the state of California is reopening since the mid-June, our group had an in-person lunch gathering recently at Tilden Regional Park after 18 months of lockdown period. During the lunch event, the SRG also celebrates the graduation of Ezra and Millard. We also welcomed Ryota, a new visiting researcher from Hiroshima University, and said goodbye to Hiroshi and Miguel who will be leaving our… Read More »Group outings at Tilden Regional Park
Dr. Millard McElwee has recently graduated from our group with a Ph.D. degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering. His dissertation, entitled “Towards resilience with simulations for accessing recovery of critical infrastructure systems from natural hazard damage”, is supervised by Prof. Kenichi Soga. Millard came to Berkeley as an MEng student in Civil Engineering Systems in 2015 and started his Ph.D. in 2016 right after earning… Read More »Congratulations, Millard!
Our research on the application of AI and ML for tunneling is highlighted by Sixense Group. In brief, Dayu Apoji, a Ph.D. researcher in our group, is trying to build “a brain” for tunnel boring machines (TBM) using machine learning algorithms so that this giant machine can make perception from enormous tunneling data (both from the machine sensors and ground instruments) and assist TBM operators… Read More »Our research on ML for Tunneling is highlighted by Sixense Group
The California Energy Commission has invested resources in finding innovative ways to monitor future offshore wind infrastructure and its impacts on the environment. A project led by LBNL is looking at if distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS), and in particular distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) can be used to both monitor the structural components of these turbines and detect cetaceans that may enter the perimeter of… Read More »Tracking Cetaceans with Fiber
On April 30th 2021, the Anura3D Research Community released the source code of their collectively developed Material Point Method (MPM) Software. The Anura3D MPM Research Community consists of a group of researchers and faculty from European and American universities, including UC Berkeley, and one independent institute that since 2014 jointly investigate the application of the MPM in geotechnics and soil-water-structure interaction problems. A Ph.D. candidate… Read More »Open-Source Release of Anura3D MPM Software
Peter and Joel from our group have been awarded the departmental Outstanding GSI Award for the academic year 2020-2021. Since joining our group in 2018, Peter has been a GSI for CE179 (Fall 2018) and CE273 (Spring 2019, Spring 2020). Meanwhile, Joel had the opportunity to GSI three different Geotechnical Engineering classes: CE175 (Spring 2020), CE270 (Fall 2020), and CE273 (Spring 2021). These are some… Read More »2020-2021 Civil & Environmental Engineering Outstanding GSI Award for Peter and Joel!
The Spring 2021 issue of Berkeley Engineer magazine features Professor Kenichi Soga’s pioneering work in the field of distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS). Read more, here.
Some of the Soga Research Group members pose for a socially-distanced group portrait at the Berkeley Rose Garden in Berkeley, Calif. on Monday, March 8, 2021. We also welcome Miguel, a Ph.D. student from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, who will be joining our group as a visiting researcher for the upcoming 6 months. (Photos by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering)
The city-scale research team recently published a paper in the Cambridge Journal of Data-Centric Engineering that uses innovative sources of real-world data to calibrate a widely used empirical relationship in traffic engineering [1]. The paper aims to address the difficulty of calibrating the macroscopic relationship between traffic volume and speed. Specifically, it combines the traffic volume data from Transport for London’s Automated Traffic Counters (Figure… Read More »Context-specific volume–delay curves by combining crowd-sourced traffic data with automated traffic counters: A case study for London
Cracking in clay is an important phenomenon that affects the long-term durability of many civil structures such as dams, levees, embankments, and landfills. In order to understand the behavior of cracking in clay, researchers at SRG, Hayato Nonaka and Yaobin Yang, conducted a four-point bending experiment on compacted kaolin clay beams. Distributed fiber optic sensors (DFOS) were embedded in the clay specimens at different heights… Read More »Crack development monitoring using distributed fiber optic sensing technology