ESR13: Using truck sensors for road pavement performance investigation

Hi crew, I hope that you are all doing well, that (as I did) you had the chance to spend some time on holidays and that, if you have been away, you enjoyed your time far from your work place, computer, e-mails, etc. Tomorrow (28th August 2018) TRUSS ITN is holding at UCD (in Dublin) the last management meeting of the project in which all ESRs will be asked to present their latest achievements, results of their research, etc. For this reason, I thought that today it was good to share with you some updates on my project. Specifically, in this blog post, I am going to talk about the current situation of my studies, recent outreach activities that I have been involved in and I will conclude by giving you a summary and some updates in regards to the outcomes of my research. So, first things first. In regards to my studies, on 1st October 2018 I am going to start my 4th (yes, FOURTH and LAST) year of studies here at the University of Nottingham. I will start my "Thesis Pen...

Hi crew, Today, 8 th March, is the International Women Day and I feel like it's time to tell you a story. Many are the women that in the past had an impact on Science and our lives and, of course, many are the women currently involved in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) related projects and that work for improving our quality of life and take care of our planet. From the past, I may mention a few Italians such as Rita Levi-Montalcini or Margherita Hack, or international ones as Rosalind Franklin, Gertrude Elion or Barbara McClintock (just to mention a few). Really, I would list them all, but probably the list would be just too long for this post. However, today I would like to tell you the story of a woman. A story full of dreams, adventures, determination and, as in most of the best stories that I know, love. The story that I am going to tell you today is the story of Maria Skłodowska-Curie. Her story is really interesting. I learnt...

Hi crew, How are you doing? I am good thanks and I hope that it is the same for you. In fact, it has been long since I wrote for you last time and lots of things happened in the meantime. In my latest post I told you that I was planning to go in Washington for another conference. This was the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting that this year celebrated its 97th edition and represents probably the biggest event for engineers and professionals in transportation at international level. Just imagine that this year they received around 6000 papers and for a conference this is just huge. They also have their own journal that publishes only the best papers submitted to the conference. Figure 1 – The White House, home of the president of the USA, and symbol of the USA. Unfortunately, this year my paper did not manage to be published in the journal of the TRB but I was honoured to be able to present part of my research in the poster session dedicated to “Truck E...

Hi crew, I hope you are doing well. Today I want to share with you my experience at the IEEE Big Data conference 2017 in Boston. This is huge event organised by the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ( IEEE ) that is one of the world largest organization for professional engineers. I attended the conference to present my paper at the workshop about applications of ‘Big Data’ technologies in the transport industry. The paper is about “Application of machine learning to fuel consumption modelling of trucks” and you can find more information about it, including an abstract and a copy of the paper before acceptance, on my Research Gate . The workshop was last week on Monday afternoon (that is in the night in Europe as there are 5 hour difference between Boston and the UK) and brought together data scientists and engineers working on applications of Big Data and machine learning in the transport industry all over the world. This include, for example, the manag...

Hi crew, Today I want to share with you the fantastic experience that I had a couple of weeks ago at TRL ( https://trl.co.uk/ ) for the PhD Day 2017 (19th July 2017). The event was meant to bring together PhD students that collaborate with TRL in their projects, giving them the opportunity to meet, and share their experience and ideas. It was the first edition of the event and it was my pleasure and honour to be part of it, having the possibility to introduce my research and experience with other PhD students. In total, eleven students with a couple of supervisors attended the event organised by the TRL Academy. Dr Alan Stevens Chief Scientist and Research Director in the Transportation Division at TRL, Dr Nick Reed the Academy Director, and Dr Helen Viner Chief Scientist Research Director in the Infrastructure Division at TRL presented and directed the operations throughout the day. The PhD Day meant to be a chance for PhD students to share ideas with their colleagues wo...

Hi crew, I hope you are fine maybe enjoying the sun at the seaside or travelling around the world for holidays. Today my post is about the ESREL Conference 2017. In fact, a few weeks ago, me and all the other TRUSS ITN ESRs attended and presented our work at the 27 th edition of ESREL. ESREL is the European Safety and Reliability Conference (I know, the acronym does not match but this is what they claim ESREL means on the website of the conference…) organised by ESRA (the European Safety and Reliability Association) in collaboration with the University of Ljubljana. The event, hosted at the Hotel Gran Bernardin in Portoroz (Slovenia), was huge with attendees from all over the world and with different backgrounds but that all care about reducing uncertainties in assessing safety and reliability of systems with applications to a number of different fields. It was the opportunity for engineers, international experts, managers, and academics to share with each other experienc...

Hi crew, Ready for a new post? Today, as I promised, I want to introduce you to plot graphs using R. R is a software that offers a large variety of solutions for plotting beautiful and fully customizable graphs and is the software that I use for my data analysis in my project. Let’s start then this brief tutorial. The dataset I will use is actually completely random, but of course, you can use any other you want. #this is a comment in R #let’s start assigning values to our ‘x’ and ‘y’ Data <- data.frame ( "X" = c(0.25, 1.85, 2.35, 2.76, 3.85, 4.55, 5.25, 6, 6.25, 7, 8.25), "Y" = c(0.35, 1.95, 2.28, 2.68, 3.97, 4.5, 4.9, 5.85, 6.48, 7.01, 8.15)) Another way to do that can be: x <- c (0.25, 1.85, 2.35, 2.76, 3.85, 4.55, 5.25, 6, 6.25, 7, 8.25) # assigns a vector to the variable ‘X’ y <- c (0.35, 1.95, 2.28, 2.68, 3.97, 4.5, 4.9, 5.85, 6.48, 7.01, 8.15)  # assigns a vector to the variable ‘Y’ Data <- data.frame ( ...

Hi crew, I hope you are doing great! After this long weekend in England, here I am with a new post for my blog. Today I want to share with you the amazing experience of attending the 1 st TRUSS ITN Workshop (24 th May 2017, London). Honestly, it was a success. International experts with different backgrounds joined the event and introduced their perspective on the topic of risk assessment and associated decision-making process related to structural safety and management of infrastructure. It was another chance for all the ESRs to learn from top managers, engineers, researchers, and professors in the field. A chance to discuss innovative methods and solutions developed nowadays in industry and academia to tackle the latest challenges in engineering. A chance to meet old and new friends and start collaboration on common concerns. A beautiful day spent in a magnificent venue as the offices of Lloyd’s Register . Please,  for more information about this and next e...