Topics and Speakers
Ioannis Brilakis
Ioannis Brilakis is a Laing O’Rourke Professor of Construction Engineering and the Director of the Construction Information Technology Laboratory at the Division of Civil Engineering of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He completed his PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in 2005. He then worked as an Assistant Professor at the Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2005-2008) and Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta (2008-2012) before moving to Cambridge in 2012 as a Laing O’Rourke Lecturer. He was promoted to Laing O’Rourke Reader in October 2017 and is a Laing O’Rourke Professor of Construction Engineering since 2021. He has also held visiting posts at the Department of Computer Science, Stanford University as a Visiting Associate Professor of Computer Vision (2014) and at the Technical University of Munich as a Visiting Professor, Leverhulme International Fellow (2018-2019), and Hans Fischer Senior Fellow (2019-2021). He is a recipient of the 2019 ASCE J. James R. Croes Medal, the 2018 ASCE John O. Bickel Award, the 2013 ASCE Collingwood Prize, the 2012 Georgia Tech Outreach Award, the NSF CAREER award, and the 2009 ASCE Associate Editor Award. Prof Brilakis is an author of over 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, an Associate Editor of the ASCE Computing in Civil Engineering, ASCE Construction Engineering and Management, Elsevier Automation in Construction, and Elsevier Advanced Engineering Informatics Journals, and a founder and first Board Chairman of the Board of Directors of the European Council on Computing in Construction.
Eleni Papadonikolaki
Eleni Papadonikolaki is an Associate Professor in Digital Innovation and Management at the Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management at University College London (UCL). Dr. Papadonikolaki is teaching at postgraduate and executive levels and leads the newly-launched MSc in Digital Engineering Management (DEM).
Her research interests lie at the intersection of management, social science, and digital economy. She is a steering board member and part-time researcher at the Construction Blockchain Consortium (CBC). She is a Partner at Digital Outlook.
Prior to joining academia Eleni worked as architect and design manager on a number of complex, international and varying-scale projects in Greece, the Netherlands, Oman and United Arab Emirates. She is an alumna of TU Delft, Netherlands and NTUA, Greece.
Eva Agapaki
Eva Agapaki is an Artificial Intelligence Assistant Professor in the M.E. Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management and the Director of the Digital Twins research lab at the University of Florida. She brings 7 years of academic and industry experiences in data analytics, AI applications in civil engineering, infrastructure computer vision, Digital Twinning and automation in construction. She recently obtained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2020, where her research pioneered the automated generation of geometric Digital Twins of existing industrial facilities from Lidar data at a commercially viable level. She conducted part of her PhD research at MIT and was awarded the U.S. National Academy of Engineering grant for addressing one of the 14 Grand Challenges in Engineering of our century. She also holds an MSc in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering from UCLA and a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Patras in Greece. She has extensive industry experience working as Innovation Lead at PTC Boston, where she led innovation projects on computer vision and deep learning applications in the manufacturing industry, and AVEVA, where she adviseds the AI team on machine learning methods for complex data (3D point cloud processing methods).
Iro Armeni
Iro Armeni is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ETH Zurich, at the departments of Civil, Env. and Geomatics Engineering and of Computer Science. She is working with Prof. Daniel Hall, Innovative and Industrial Construction, and with Prof. Marc Pollefeys, Computer Vision and Geometry Lab. She is also part of the Design++ initiative at ETHZ.
Iro is interested in interdisciplinary research between Civil Engineering and Machine Perception. Her area of focus is on automated semantic and operational understanding of buildings throughout their life cycle using visual data.
Iro completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University on August 2020, Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department, Sustainable Design and Construction (SDC) Program, with a Ph.D. minor at the Computer Science Department. She conducted research under the supervision of Martin Fischer (CEE, Center for Integrated Facility Engineering – CIFE) and Silvio Savarese (Computer Science Department, Stanford Vision and Leanring Lab – SVL). Prior to her Ph.D., she received an MEng in Architecture and Digital Design (University of Tokyo-2011), an MSc in Computer Science (Ionian University-2013), and a Diploma in Architectural Engineering (National Technical University of Athens-2009). She has also worked as an architect and consultant for both the private and public sectors.
James O’Donnell
James O’Donnell is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, University College Dublin. He joined University College Dublin (UCD) in June 2013. Prior to this appointment, he worked as a senior Scientific Engineering Associate in the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). His current work focuses on the development and deployment of interoperable and BIM based solutions to support multi-scale energy modelling, from individual buildings to national building stocks. It is in this capacity that he contributes to buildingSMART’s Building Energy Modelling IDM Expert Panel. In addition to technical research and consulting, James teaches modules focusing on building physics and building energy modelling. Previously, he taught courses at Stanford University, National University of Ireland Galway, and University College Cork on building performance analysis, building physics and HVAC analysis respectively. He also worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). James has a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering and a Ph.D. in holistic building performance analysis from University College Cork (UCC). He is also an editorial board member for the Elsevier journal Advanced Engineering Informatics.