Construction Systems (COS)

This event is to celebrate the launch of a new Construction Systems (COS) Master’s Program in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UC Berkeley. Our first cohort of students admitted into the Program will arrive on campus later this year. 

In recent years, the construction industry has been changing at an accelerating speed, driven by innovation and automation to meet the need for an increasingly sophisticated and sustainable built environment, while addressing worker shortages and ever-so-important safety and health concerns.

We are delighted to invite you to attend and participate in our Construction Innovation Day.

The agenda for the day includes presentations by faculty as well as Cal alums who are working in advancing the state of the art of construction means and methods driven by innovative developments and uses of technologies for sensing, automation, and data processing.  

Date, Time, and Venue

Please register to let us know you will be attending and participating in this event.

The Early Bird rate applies up to and including Friday 11 April 2025.

• General Participant: Early bird $100, later $150
• Event Sponsor or Presenter: Early bird $0, later $0
• Current UC Berkeley Student or Faculty: Early bird $0, later $50
• Cal Alum: Early bird $0, later $75
• Full time student or Academic not Affiliated with UC Berkeley: Early bird $25, later $75

THANK YOU GOLD SPONSOR

THANK YOU BRONZE SPONSOR

Inviduals or companies wishing to sponsor this event or otherwise contribute to the Construction Systems Program please reach out to Professor Tommelein via email tommelein@berkeley.edu or phone 510 334-1753.

Agenda

8:00 doors open: Sign-in, Coffee & Pastries

8:30 to 8:35: Opening Remarks – Professor Iris Tommelein

8:35 to 8:45: Welcome – Professor Joan Walker, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department Chair

8:45 to 8:55: New Construction Systems Program – Professor Iris Tommelein

8:55 to 9:25: Autonomous Robotic Systems for Sustainable Construction – Christoph Heuer, New COS Assistant Professor

9:25 to 9:55: Takt Planning and Reality Capture – Professor Iris Tommelein

9:55 to 10:25: The Future of Reality Capture, AI, and Robotics in Construction – Phil Lorenzo, DroneDeploy

10:25 to 10:45: Coffee Break (20 minutes)

10:45 to 11:20: EBMUD’s Construction Innovations – David H. Katzev, Manager of Pipeline Construction at EBMUD

11:20 to 12:00: Smart Infrastructure and Construction – Professor Kenichi Soga

12:00 to 13:30: Lunch

13:30 to 14:00: Purposeful AI Agents for Civil Engineering and Construction – Dr. Emin Burak Onat, CivCore AI

14:00 to 14:40: Efficient Drone Inspection: A Technology Stack – Professor Raja Sengupta, Gaofeng Su, and Carlo Bosio

14:40 to 15:00: Coffee Break (20 minutes)

15:00 to 15:40: Intelligent Sensing and Simulation for Real-Time Infrastructure Evaluation – Professor Khalid M. Mosalam, Claudio Perez, and Gaofeng Su

15:40 to 16:30: Opportunities for Industry/Academic Collaboration in ConTech – PANEL Chaired by Professor Dimitrios Zekkos

• Phil Lorenzo, DroneDeploy
• David H. Katzev, EBMUD
• Professor Avideh Zakhor, EECS
• Randall Thompson, Preconstruction Executive Nibbi Prefab

16:30 to 16:35: Closing Remarks – Professor Iris Tommelein

16:35 to 18:00: Social: Beer, Wine, and Hors d’Oeuvres

Construction Systems Faculty & Industry Presenters

Professor Iris Tommelein

Iris Tommelein is the Roy W. Carlson Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Project Management / Construction Systems, and she directs the Project Production Systems Laboratory (P2SL) at UC Berkeley.

Iris was one of four founders in 1997 of the Lean Construction Institute (LCI) and has received LCI’s Lean Pioneer Award. She is an active member of the International Group for Lean Construction.

In 2005, jointly with Glenn Ballard, she founded P2SL to engage with practitioners and students studying both the theory and practical application of Lean Thinking in the Architecture-Engineering-Construction-Facilities Management industry. Among other research projects, she has been involved since 2012 in takt planning research, workshop delivery, and implementation. She and Glenn are now soliciting inputs as they develop the 2025 Benchmark of the Last Planner(R) System (the 2020 Benchmark is available here).

Professor Kenichi Soga

Kenichi Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Professor in Mineral Engineering and a Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Soga is also the Director of the Berkeley Center for Smart Infrastructure, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and serves as a Special Advisor to the Dean of the College of Engineering for Resilient and Sustainable Systems.

Soga’s research focuses on infrastructure sensing, performance-based design and maintenance of infrastructure, energy geotechnics, and geomechanics. He has published more than 450 journal and conference papers and is the co-author of “Fundamentals of Soil Behavior” with Professor James K Mitchell.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the Engineering Academy of Japan.

He has received several notable awards, including the George Stephenson Medal and Telford Gold Medal from ICE in 2006, the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from ASCE in 2007, and the UCB Bakar Prize for his work on commercializing smart infrastructure technologies in 2022.

Professor Dimitrios Zekkos

Dimitrios Zekkos is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Zekkos’ research focuses on infrastructure resilience, informatics, landfills, geotechnical engineering, geoenvironmental engineering, and earthquake engineering. His research approach has commonly involved designing and employing innovative experimental (in the laboratory and the field) and computational approaches that aim to provide new insights and inform improved models of earth material response to static and dynamic loads. Zekkos is a recipient of the prestigious Outstanding Innovator Award from the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering in 2015, the ASCE Arthur Casagrande Professional Development Award in 2012, the ASCE Collingwood Prize and ASCE Middlebrooks Award, among other notable achievements.

Professor Raja Sengupta

Raja Sengupta is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Sengupta’s research focuses on automated cars, drones, connected cars, smartphone apps for economics & transportation, wireless networking, and control theory. He likes to do research on the industry and get it into the marketplace, and he holds car-to-road networking patents with Toyota, a UAV patent with BAE Aerospace, and car-to-car networking contributions standardized by the SAE into J2945. Sengupta has been an advisor to the World Bank, is a recipient of the USDOT’s Connected Vehicle Technology award in 2011, the UC Berkeley Energy and Climate Lectures Innovation award in 2014, and has authored over a hundred papers spanning control theory, networking, drones, and transportation.

Professor Khalid M. Mosalam

Khalid M. Mosalam is the Taisei Professor of Civil Engineering and the Director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center at UC Berkeley. Mosalam’s research focuses on the performance and health monitoring of structures, assessment, and rehabilitation of essential facilities (i.e., bridges and electrical substations), large-scale computations and experiments, including hybrid simulation, and building energy efficiency and sustainability. In support of his research activities, Mosalam has conducted research in the past 23 years with funding from NSF, Caltrans, FEMA, Intel, US-DOE, NRF-Singapore, and several private industries. He is the recipient of the prestigious ASCE Huber civil engineering research prize in 2006, the UC-Berkeley chancellor award for public services in 2013, and the EERI outstanding paper award in 2015 for his work on Earthquake Spectra, among other notable achievements.

Inviduals or companies wishing to sponsor this event or otherwise contribute to the Construction Systems Program please reach out to Professor Iris Tommelein at tommelein@berkeley.edu or 510 334-1753.