Tien, Lee win top paper award at Resilience Week 2018

Graduate student Cynthia Lee, left, and Assistant Professor Iris Tien with their first-place infrastructure paper aware at Resilience Week 2018. (Photo Courtesy: Iris Tien)
Graduate student Cynthia Lee, left, and Assistant Professor Iris Tien with their first-place infrastructure paper aware at Resilience Week 2018. (Photo Courtesy: Iris Tien)

Two Georgia Tech researchers have won the first-place paper award in infrastructure at Resilience Week 2018 for their work using a variety of data sources to better understand and design infrastructure systems.

It’s the second consecutive year that Iris Tien and one of her students have won a top paper award at the conference, which focuses on making critical infrastructure — like power, water, transportation — and communities more reliable and secure.

The paper by Cynthia Lee and Tien detailed work using data from sensors, crowd-sourcing and other sources to improve what Tien called “situational awareness” for these critical systems.

“The paper showed how different sources of data help us understand these systems better, and how we might design systems with different characteristics that are more resilient,” said Tien, an assistant professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“A key to this is also considering interdependencies between multiple systems.”

The Resilience Week symposium would seem an ideal venue for Tien’s work understanding those interdependencies. The annual gathering of researchers and scientists from public agencies, universities and private industry focuses on uncovering the hidden connections of critical systems to more effectively mitigate the impacts from disaster and improve recovery.