Associate professor Oswald Chong (front row, third from right) is the founder the International Conference on Sustainable Design, Engineering and Construction. He is pictured with the team of engineering and construction students who helped manage activities at the recent conference at ASU. Front row: (left to right) Jeewah Lee and Mohammed Alshayeh, University of Kansas (KU) doctoral students; HariHaran Naganathan, ASU doctoral student; Oswald Chong; Jae Chang, KU, founding member of conference; Haider Mohamed, KU doctoral student. Back row: Vamsi Sai Kalasapudi and Fernanda Rio Cruz, ASU doctoral students; Kaleigh Campbell, ASU alumnus; Seungtaek Lee, ASU doctoral student; and Trey Tan, ASU master’s student.
Academics and industry leaders from 31 countries participated in the International Conference on Sustainable Design, Engineering and Construction (ICSDEC) May 18–20 that was hosted and led by a group of Fulton Schools faculty.
It was the fourth and largest ICSDEC event, which was founded by Oswald Chong, an associate professor in the Fulton Schools’ School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment and the Del E. Web School of Construction.
More than 250 professionals attended, coming from China, India, Japan, the United, Kingdom, Italy, Norway, Ecuador, Korea and Colombia, among others countries, including those from 32 states throughout the United States.
The focus of the conference is on giving participants the latest data and science to integrate it into their work in sustainability, resilience and construction, said Chong, who continues to help organize the event as its founding chair.
The event offers information on a wide range of topics and innovations that is not available at other conferences — including research and technologies being developed in other countries, Chong said.
The College Avenue Commons Building, home of the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment and the Del E. Web School of Construction, provided an appropriate setting for the sustainability conference.
Co-sponsored by the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE) Architectural Engineering Institute, the conference covers advances in mobility, housing, water, energy, communications, land use, resource management, materials, processes, finance, policy, systems and spaces, land use and management, economic diversity, economic growth and jobs, structural unemployment and stability, engineering solutions, bio-wastes and materials, transportation and systems integration.
In addition, there were reports on advancements in building information modeling, planning, controls and methods, quantitative methods, productivity and workforce issues, risk management, safety, health management, contracting, project delivery, legal issues, advanced informatics, organizational and global issues, construction materials, and social media text mining.
It also delved into areas of intelligent systems and “big data,” including data analytics, machine learning, applications, social media, data mining, automation, and related system integration.
The conference received over 400 submissions, and accepted and published 204 manuscripts in Elsevier’s Procedia Engineering, and accepted 267 oral and poster presentations. The conference has an acceptance rate of about 50 per cent. Selected manuscripts will also be rewritten for two special-issue journals.
“It is truly an international conference that promotes the sharing of ideas between many countries and disciplines, and I am surprised that it has grown so fast in just five years since its inception,” Chong said.
Read more at www.icsdec.org
The executive chair for the conference was Professor G. Edward Gibson, director of the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment.
Several other faculty members of the school and the Del E Webb School of Construction helped lead the event.
The academic chair was Assistant Professor Kristen Parrish. Academic co-chairs were Assistant Professors Pingbo Tang and David Grau.
The Building Information Management theme chair was Assistant Professor Steven Ayer.
Professor and construction engineering program chair Samuel Ariaratnam was the conference’s Industry-Academic Integration chair, and Assistant Professor Mounir Al Esmar was the co-chair.
The industry committee chair was George Whitten, an environmental engineer with Carollo Engineers in Phoenix and an ASU alumnus.
