Civil infrastructure is aging while facing escalating pressures from climate change, extreme natural hazards, and evolving societal demands. Reactive management can no longer guarantee long-term safety and community resilience. Infrastructure must instead be designed to continuously sense, learn, and adapt. This talk explores how embedding advanced sensing into infrastructure during construction or rehabilitation can transform physical assets into adaptive, “smart” systems. The sensing includes distributed fiber-optic sensors, wireless sensor networks, computer vision, and satellite monitoring. These sensors capture continuous, high-precision performance data across 100-year service lives. Combined with high-performance computational modeling, artificial intelligence, and socio-technical digital twins, the data supports structural health monitoring and simulation of complex disaster scenarios such as earthquakes and wildfires. It also supports real-time emergency response and maintenance decisions. Embedding intelligence directly into the built environment shifts infrastructure management from passive endurance to proactive adaptability.
Speaker Biography
Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair and a Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure, and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research focuses on smart infrastructure, specializing in advanced sensing technologies and computational modeling for resilient urban infrastructure systems. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, Soga previously served as Editor-in-Chief of Data-Centric Engineering and received the UC Berkeley Bakar Prize for commercializing smart infrastructure innovations.
About Air Time by NAMS-2
Air Time is a series of seminars on advanced aviation hosted by Crown Innovations, Inc. The seminars feature leading experts on cutting-edge research who share interesting ideas on pertinent topics and innovative methodologies. Air Time seminars will be held weekly at NASA Ames Research Center and online. A NASA badge is required to attend in person.
Crown Innovations, Inc. is the prime contractor for the NASA Academic Mission Services 2 (NAMS-2) contract. Contact the program management at nams2pmo@crownci.com for more information or to arrange a collaboration in your field.