Welcome to Advanced-Infrastructure.com - an online community of engineering professionals, researchers and others interested in the promotion of advanced computing, sensing and continuous state monitoring and proactive decision support technologies to help address our long-term civil engineering and infrastructure management needs.

What exactly is Advanced Infrastructure and why is it important?

Our infrastructure systems - broadly defined here to include our transportation systems, energy and telecommunications networks, environmental systems and buildings - are the essential building blocks of society. Without these critical systems, our quality of life would diminish and our civilization, as we know it, would ultimately crumble and die. Unfortunately, here in the United States, almost every sector of our aging infrastructure is failing and in critical need of repair. Other countries in the world face similar or worse infrastructure problems and yet we know that our global resources are limited. Addressing these issues will undoubtedly be among the greatest challenges of the 21st century.

In order to achieve long-term sustainability, our infrastructure systems and the processes to design, build, and operate those systems must evolve. They must become more data-rich - able to continuously monitor their conditions, model and store the collected data for real-time and future use. They must become more intelligent - able to perform self-assessment and support proactive decision making that improves their performance, increases their life spans and reduces life-cycle costs and impacts. They must become more green - such that we are confident that Earth's resources are being used at a rate at which they can be replenished. By necessity, our infrastructure systems will evolve to become advanced infrastructure systems. Doing so will require us to be bold and visionary. It will require a great deal of interdisciplinary collaboration and participation from individuals in every sector of the general civil engineering community, as well as from other related fields - electrical engineering, computer science, government and public policy, for example.

The Advanced-Infrastructure Community

Given the overall need for interdisciplinary collaboration, the goal of this site is to create an open, grass-roots community in which the readers are participants, as well. At Advanced-Infrastructure.com, members are encouraged to post their own thoughts and insightful content, using the authoring tools provided within this site. The following are just a few of the ways active members may contribute to the success of the Advanced-Infrastructure community:

• Students and academics: Share information about your latest academic research, identify potential collaborators and solicit feedback from like-minding colleagues.
• Engineering professionals: Share success stories and lessons learned from real-world case studies.
• Educators: Create web tutorials and teach others to apply innovative techniques to practical problems.
• Infrastructure Managers: Tell us about the day-to-day issues you may face, and actively solicit feedback from the general community. Researchers may already be working on a solution to your problem, or you could provide a student with valuable research ideas.
• Casual readers: Pass on a pertinent article that you recently read and share your finding with others.
• Everybody: Connect with others in the Advanced-Infrastructure community through our Members Directory. As I mentioned before, this is a unique and tight-knit niche within the civil engineering community. Be a part of it, network and grow.

About the Author

My name is Damon Weiss. I am a Professional Engineer with over eleven years of civil engineering experience, with knowledge of civil / site design, transportation, municipal and water resources engineering. In general, I enjoy the work I do, and have found a great deal of success and personal satisfaction in my career. Simultaneously, however, my real passion has always been in computer science, artificial intelligence, sensors, robotics and other innovative technologies. Throughout my education and career, therefore, it has always been my goal to find a way to combine these interests and help advance the use of computing and emerging technologies within the engineering community. Eventually, my interests led me to pursue my Master's degree in Advanced Infrastructure Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. The program was a perfect fit - an awakening for me, in fact. During my time at Carnegie Mellon University, I met some incredible people, with amazing ideas for the future of civil engineering and infrastructure management. I realized that I had suddenly become part of an exciting, new and largely untapped niche of civil engineering. At the same time, it became apparent that this niche was also fairly obscure within the general civil engineering community. In fact, I would estimate that the bulk of the knowledge of this field presently resides about 90% within the academic world, and only about 10% in industry. One of the major purposes of this online community, therefore, is to help bridge that gap, and hopefully bring some of the ideas and concepts from the classroom and research labs into practical engineering application.

Thank you very much for visiting.

Damon