Dr. Burcu Akinci is a Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering and co-director of Pennsylvania Smarter Infrastructure Incubator at Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her BS in Civil Engineering (1991) from Middle East Technical University and her MBA (1993) from Bilkent University at Ankara, Turkey. After that, she earned her MS (1995) and her Ph.D. (2000) in Civil and Environmental Engineering with a specialization in Construction Engineering and Management from Stanford University. Her research interests include development of approaches to model and reason about information rich histories of facilities, to streamline construction and facility management processes. She specifically focuses on investigating utilization and integration of building information models with data capture and tracking technologies, such as 3D imaging, embedded sensors and radio-frequency identification systems to capture semantically-rich as-built histories of construction projects and facility operations. Dr. Akinci has one patent, two patent applications, over 60 referred journal publications, and 80 refereed conference publications. She co-edited a book on CAD/GIS Integration and another book on Embedded Commissioning. She has graduated more than 16 PhD students and 15 MS thesis students, and is currently advising/co-advising 4 PhD students.

Mario Berges is an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He is interested in making our built environment more operationally efficient and robust through the use of information and communication technologies, so that it can better deal with future resource constraints and a changing environment. Berges is the faculty co-director of the IBM Smart Infrastructure Analytics Laboratory at CMU, as well as the director of the Intelligent Infrastructure Research Lab (INFERLab). Among recent awards, he received the Outstanding Early Career Researcher award from FIATECH in 2010, and the Dean’s Early Career Fellowship from CMU in 2015.

Dr. Ban’s research goal is to help resolve transportation related congestion, energy and emission problems, by promoting new technologies and transportation options in a way that is beneficial to the society at large. For this, he uses mathematical modeling and computer simulation techniques to explore how various transportation systems operate in tandem, from freight trucks to passenger cars to transit vehicles, and how they may be managed and/or operate cooperatively for the common good. To develop more efficient, safer transportation systems, he utilizes insight from vehicle sensors, as well as other data gathering methods, to learn/predict vehicle and transportation system performances. Recently, he develops modeling tools to study dynamic transportation networks with emerging technologies and systems such as connected/automated vehicles and shared mobility. He also works on urban traffic system state estimation and prediction using mobile sensing data.

Deputy Vice-Dean for Foreign Relations - for International Projects / Faculty of Transportation Sciences / FTS Manager for Projects / Department of Transportation Systems / Faculty of Transportation Sciences / Department of Logistics and Management of Transport / FTS

Victor M. Larios has received his PhD and a DEA (French version of a MS program) in Computer Science at the Technological University of Compiègne, France and a BA in Electronics Engineering at the ITESO University in Guadalajara, Mexico. Working at the University of Guadalajara, he holds a Full Professor-Researcher position at the Department of Information Systems in the CUCEA Campus. His research works are focused in distributed systems strategies to improve the support for large communities interacting on virtual reality environments ans Serious Games. Such strategies include computer mobile agents, optimization of algorithms for distributed and concurrency support and large scale simulations. As main projects, Victor M. Larios have worked in the development of Virtual Laboratories for educational activities, collaborative systems for interactive support and data visualization. Current works are focused in the development of Virtual Reality interfaces for collaborative Serious Games and large scale simulations. As other activities at the University of Guadalajara, he is the director od the Research Center in Systems & Information Management (CISGI). He is also, the Coordinator of the PhD in Information Technologies at the PostGraduate School and the Information Systems Department, University of Guadalajara. The PhD program is labeled as a quality program in Mexico by the PNPC CONACYT accreditation agency. Eventually, Dr. Victor M. Larios participates in a IT council at the CUCEA UdeG Campus (Related to a Business School with 15,000.00 Students) to give the guidelines to support and innovate the Campus IT services. Victor M. Larios is also an IEEE valued member for 17 years and an ACM member for 11 years.