Keynote Speaker

"D⁴AR – 4 Dimensional Augmented Reality – Models for Automation and Interactive Visualization of Construction Progress Monitoring"

Abstract:
Early detection of actual or potential performance deviations in field construction activities is critical to project management as it provides an opportunity to initiate proactive actions to avoid them or minimize their impacts. Despite the importance, current monitoring practice includes manual data collection and extensive data extraction, non-systematic and generic reporting, and visually/spatially complex representations. This talk addresses these challenges by introducing the underlying hypotheses and algorithms for automated generation of D4AR – 4D augmented reality – models for automating and visualizing monitoring of sustainable built environments. These models assembled through superimposition of 4D point clouds generated from unordered daily construction photo collections and 4D Building Information Models, visualize performance deviations and allow Architecture/Engineering/Construction professionals to intuitively observe problems, conduct various decision-making tasks, and minimize detrimental impacts of performance deviations in an augmented-reality environment rather than the real world which is time-consuming and costly. Moreover, application of D4AR models, developed with several challenging building construction photo collections captured under different lighting conditions and server occlusions, demonstrates that component-based tracking of progress at schedule-activity level could be automated. These models generate a new research paradigm by allowing researchers further develop visual and spatial sensing techniques to automatically track productivity, safety, quality, and carbon footprint of operations.

Biographical Information:
Feniosky Peña-Mora is Dean of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science and Morris A. and Alma Shapiro Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He also holds academic appointments as Professor of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, Professor of Earth and Environmental Engineering, and Professor of Computer Science. He assumed his posts at Columbia Engineering on July 15, 2009. He was previously the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and associate provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He had been an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and visiting professor at international universities, including Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Dean Peña-Mora is the author or co-author of more than 100 scholarly publications, has served as editor of several professional journals, is the author of an influential textbook on construction conflict resolution, and holds five patents. He holds numerous prestigious awards, including the White House Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize of the American Society of Civil Engineers. In 2008, he was recognized with that Society’s Computing in Civil Engineering Award for outstanding achievement and contribution in the use of computers in the practice of civil engineering. After graduating from Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez Ureña in Santo Domingo, D.R., he continued his studies at MIT, from which he received a master’s degree in civil engineering and doctoral degree in civil engineering systems.