News

On Wednesday, May 18th, 2022, we celebrated our first in-person Ph.D. graduation commencement within the Berkeley College of Engineering. Prof. Kenichi Soga hooded 7 Ph.D. graduates that he advised (or co-advised). Here are some pictures of the celebrations yesterday together with the graduates’ families and friends. The SRG extended families SRG Ph.D. graduates 2020-2022: (from left to right) Ezra Tjung, Ruonan Ou, Renjie Wu, John… Read More »PhD Graduation Commencement 2022

The SRG went to Tilden Regional Park for a group outing on May 15, 2022. We celebrated the graduation of Ruonan, Renjie, Peter, and Andrew who are finishing their PhDs this summer. We also welcome Sumeet who is joining our group as a Postdoc.

On Tuesday, April 19, Congressman Eric Swalwell of California’s 15th Congressional District visited the Center for Smart Infrastructure. Researchers of the Soga Research Group, colleagues from the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, campus administrators, and industry partners presented various technologies and projects to envision collaborative opportunities for monitoring the health of our civil infrastructure.        

On Friday, April 1st, the SRG researchers, James, Shih-Hung, Tianyu, and Emily, and researchers from Berkeley CEE and CSI conducted and demonstrated the first saddle test in the Center of Smart Infrastructure, where 0.9-mm-diameter fiber optic cables and LUNA analyzer were used to monitor the behavior of the pipeline and the saddle under the increasing monotonic pull.

(Credit: Adam Lau) Prof. Kenichi Soga and the SRG are featured in the recent news articles published in the campus-wide news column as well as in CEE.  Our group has been investigating how communities can use ground source heat pumps and other geothermal technologies to provide energy more sustainably. The SRG and team from Berkeley Lab drilled a borehole that extends 400 feet below ground,… Read More »Kenichi Soga and the SRG explore geothermal heating on campus

Robotic technologies have huge potential to explore in numerous applications. One of the areas is in the AEC industry, which enables boosted productivity while reducing the safety risks. Today, in the GEO Wednesday seminar, Mr. Anton Marinovich from HoloBuilder and Mr. Rich Lyons from Boston Dynamics showcased the full capabilities and the potential of Spot® in infrastructure sensing. See Spot’s interaction with the group below.… Read More »Spot® was spotted in Davis Hall

Joel, Dayu, and Kenichi went to Charlotte, North Carolina to attend GeoCongress 2022. Joel presented a poster on “Modeling Wellbore Erosion Using Standard and Cut-mesh Approaches in Material Point Method”, while Dayu presented his work on “Soil Classification and Feature Importance of EPBM Data Using Random Forests”. Kenichi gives a state-of-the-art lecture on “System-Level Sensing or Distributed Sensing“. Here are some pictures. Joel during his… Read More »GeoCongress 2022 at Charlotte, North Carolina

Four UC Berkeley faculty members, including Prof. Kenichi Soga, whose technological innovations promise to deliver solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems, have been awarded the Bakar Fellows Program 2022 Bakar Prize. Kenichi has been awarded for the project “Distributed sensor system for smart infrastructure” which has been one of the core research themes in our group. Congratulations Kenichi! Read more, here.

The SRG visited the Richmond Field Station on Friday, March 4th, where the new Center of Smart Infrastructure is established. Jaewon and Peter presented a distributed accoustic sensing (DAS) demonstration which has been implemented on a 48’ wide and 310’ long paved roadway instrumented with distributed fiber optic sensors (DFOS). Read more here:– Center of Smart Infrastructure– DAS pavement research

The SRG group dinner in Berkeley on Feb 25, 2022. We welcomed Adriana and Emily who are joining our group as visiting researchers within the next few months. We also said goodbye to Bingyu and Ryota who will be leaving our group in early March. The SRG group member Kenichi, Ryota, and Reiko Kenichi and Bingyu