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CE691M - Geomatics Engineering Seminar, Spring 2009

Time: 1:30 – 2:20pm, Thursdays; Location: CIVL 2107 (if not otherwise indicated)

October 1, 2009

Construction and Sustainable Infrastructure: Advanced Applications of Spatial and Information Technologies

Hubo Cai, Ph.D., P.E., GISP, Assistant Professor

Division of Construction Engineering and Management School of Civil Engineering

The nation’s civil infrastructure consists of transportation and communication systems, water and power lines, waste and wastewater treatment plants, and public institutions. These infrastructure systems are enormous in size and are facing a long list of problems: aging facilities, inferior performance, limited resources, and significant negative environmental impacts. The concept of infrastructure management emerged as a potential remedy, the overall goal of which is to allocate limited resources to achieve a safer, more efficient, and environmentally friendly infrastructure system.

The significance of this nation’s civil infrastructure problems has greatly motivated researchers and practitioners. New tools and technologies and their creative applications have emerged to solve conventional construction and infrastructure engineering problems and consequently, to assist in solving this infrastructure crisis. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are one of these spatial and information technologies and have a great potential. A wide range of GIS applications can be found to cover the whole life cycle of civil infrastructure systems from planning, to programming and budgeting, design, construction, operation and maintenance/repair/rehabilitation, and ending at demolition/disposal.

This seminar will be discussing applications of spatial and information technologies in civil infrastructure systems, based on both academic research projects and industrial engineering practice. The focus will be on GIS applications in civil infrastructure inventory, transportation infrastructure modeling, impacts from highway and bridge construction on traveling and traffic, interaction of civil infrastructure and floods, and environmental impact analysis and construction site runoff management, and the great potential of GIS in improving construction planning and management.

Bio:

Hubo Cai came to the United States from China in 1999, with a Bachelor’s degree from Tongji University. From August 1999 to May 2000, Cai was a graduate student at Iowa State University and later, he transferred to North Carolina State University. Cai received a Master of Civil Engineering and a PhD from North Carolina State University in 2001 and 2004, respectively, with a research focus on 3D spatial modeling and GIS applications in civil engineering. Upon graduation, Cai served as a GIS specialist with the GIS unit of the NC Department of Transportation. He joined URS as a GIS/Database Applications Developer in June 2004. In January 2007, Cai moved to Michigan and became a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Construction Engineering at Western Michigan University. Cai joined Purdue University in August 2009 and presently he is an assistant professor in the School of Civil Engineering and the Division of Construction Engineering and Management.

September 17, 2009

Flood Mapping and Damage Assessment with Remote Sensing and Web Mapping Technology

Ejaz Hussain, KyoHyouk Kim

The importance and significance of remote sensing and web mapping technology is proven during the June 2008 floods along the river courses in Indiana, USA. This talk highlight the use of Landsat images and the Google Earth plug-in to produce and populate flood maps and estimate the flood damages in nine counties in southern Indiana. The Landsat images acquired on June 11, 2008 become the most useful data as the peak flooding was observed on June10 and 11, 2008 in this area. The flooded areas are then estimated with reference to the Landsat image collected on June 9, 2007. The temporal images, US Department of Agriculture 2007,2008 crop data, and Indiana Department of Transportation 2005 road data enable us to accurately map the flood extents and assess the flood damages to the standing crops, roads and the evaluation of designated floodplains. It is found that about 6% of the corn, 22% of soybean, 12.5% of the wheat, and 5% of the roads were affected by the flooding. Moreover, the flood water did overflow the designated floodplains at a number of places. The resultant flood and damage maps are then made available on the Internet through the Google Earth plug-in. Many functionalities and data layers in Google Earth are integrated into the developed web service, which helps decision makers and the public to respond and take necessary actions against such natural disasters.

Bio: The speakers are Ph.D students in Geomatics.

September 10, 2009

DriftWatch – an online mapping service

Larry Theller, Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering

WWW.DriftWatch.org -is an online mapping service for pesticide-sensitive crops. Driven by losses to commercial growers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2008 season, Driftwatch is a grant and industry funded effort by Purdue Ag. and Biological Engineering, Purdue Extension, and The Office of the Indiana State Chemist. The purpose of the site is to let growers of such commercial crops as are sensitive to drifting pesticides enter their fields into a database visible on GoogleMaps. The commercial pesticide applicator industry is able to view these fields as they prepare to spray nearby fields . The crops include grapes, tomatoes, vegetables, fruit-trees, organic vegetables, beehives, greenhouses and others. This site is based on open-source products: geoserver, postgresql, postgis, google maps.

Bio:

Larry Theller is a Geographic Information Specialist in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department(ABE). He is support staff on many online environmental models in ABE. He works on research projects with a variety of departments at Purdue from School of Engineering, School of Agriculture, School of Liberal Arts, and Discovery Park.

September 3, 2009

Placing knowledge in space with Visible Past

Prof. Sorin Adam Matei, Department of Communication

Visible Past is a location-aware learning environment geared toward the delivery, discovery, and storage of information, but using the spatial and temporal characteristics of that information as the organizing structure. It is being developed at Purdue University by a multidisciplinary team of faculty and students of Communication.

The main Visible Past aim is to enhance research, classroom, and museum learning by harnessing the implicit space and time attributes of information while at the same time fully embracing the read/write ethic. We intend for the platform to validate and extend a theoretical framework for humanities research and learning. We aim to establish a set of methodological tools for virtual reality, location-sensitive research and learning that can be extended to other environments and, indeed, other disciplines. For more information, visit http://visiblepast.net/home/

Professor Matei studies the socio-spatial dimensions of on-line social interaction and communities. Applying spatial analysis he has developed a research program that explores the collaborative implications of location aware technologies. His most recent projects are http://visiblepast.net,  http://veffort.us, http://wikiway.net, and http://thoughtark.com. His research has appeared in the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, the American Behavioral Scientist, and the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication. He has published a book on paramodern social groups (The Mind Boyars) and maintains two research blogs, one in english, http://matei.org/ithink and one in Romanian, http://pagini.com/blog .  A former journalist, he is a current collaborator of Foreign Policy, Esquire and several Romanian language national publications.

August 27, 2009

Planning session; Safety training (Karen Hatke)