ESR13: Using truck sensors for road pavement performance investigation

Hi crew, I hope that you are all doing great. First of all, today, I would like to thank you all for the fantastic achievement that this blog reached last week: 10,000 views from all over the world!!! How cool is that??!! It is just awesome and you are awesome that you keep visiting and reading my blog. Thanks a lot for that. But lets focus on today's topic. Today I am going to share with you another of my great experiences. A few weeks ago, I have been invited by Dr. Davide Lo Presti and Dr. Ana Jiménez del Barco Carrión, respectively Coordinator and Project Managers of SMARTI ETN , to share with their fellows my experience about the use of social media and blog for communicating Science. Honestly, in my experience, I never had the possibility of lecturing to a proper classroom and I thought that this was another massive opportunity, which I could not miss. I was honoured and excited about being invited for sharing my own perspectives with other researchers, and i...

Hi crew, After a long while, here I am back with a new post for you ladies and gentlemen. Today I would like to talk with you about my experience at the ROSE workshop 2017 in Copenhagen. This that I attended was  the 5 th  edition of the workshop sponsored by the ROSE project that every year involves about 30 experts from different institutions working on low rolling resistance and greener road pavements around the world. The workshop is a two days event that this year took place in Copenhagen on Thursday 23rd November and Friday 24th November, 2017. Yes guys, it was just last week. I am pretty quick in giving you news and updates on my project. The experience overall was just great and gave me the opportunity of sharing results of my research and make some networking for  future collaboration. At the end of my presentation I received some very interesting questions that opened discussion within the attendees and that made me proud of the work done so far. You...

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, 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...

Hello crew! How are you doing? I hope you had a wonderful Easter break with your family and friends. Today, I have great news for you. I am just back from Italy where I spent my Easter break with my girlfriend and my relatives and attended my first International Conference on behalf of TRUSS ITN. The event was the 1 st International Congress on Transport Infrastructures & Systems (TIS) 2017 organized in Rome (Italy) by the AIIT (Italian Association of Transport Engineers) in collaboration with many public and private international sponsors. It was great, and it was attended by experts from all over the world. For me, it was the opportunity for introducing the initial findings of my study, receiving their comments and suggestions about the current work and future development of the project. I presented my work related to road asset management in the Session 17 of the congress. The title of the work presented in Rome is: “A big data approach to assess the influence ...

Hey crew, Are you alright? Are you ready for reading a new post? Alright, let’s start then! Almost a month ago I started my secondment in Microlise Ltd . As I already mentioned in the past: Microlise is one of the two companies that is involved within my project. They are experts in truck fleet management and they collect and analyse data from large truck fleets for helping their customer in maximising utilisation, increasing efficiency, and improving economy and safety for their fleets. Fig.1 – The Microlise Ltd logo. How is it going here in Microlise? Well, I have to say that working in the company has pros and cons. The cons are mainly related to the timing: I have to wake up at 6:00am every morning and it takes 1 hour-ish by bus to get to  Eastwood, where Microlise is located. Then, I go back home very late (sometimes I come back home after 6:30pm). Fig. 2 – No crew, it is not that terrible! ;) This means that quite often I’m tired, and ...

Hey crew! Are you ready for a new post?! Here we go then! Today I’m going to introduce you to a more technical topic. In fact, we are going to talk about machine learning and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in particular. Machine learning is a subfield of computer science which aims to give computers the ability to do something without being explicitly programmed for doing that. Originally, it comes from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence. Exploring the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from experience (historical data), the algorithm operates by building a model from example inputs in order to make data-driven predictions or decisions. ANN is just a branch of Machine Learning. They are data processing paradigms inspired by the way the biological nervous system process information in human beings (Biological Neural Networks, BNNs). Usually they are used to estimate or approximate functions t...

Hello crew, how is it going? “R” you ready for a new post? Today I’ll introduce the software that I’m using for the data analysis in my project. The name of the software is “ R ”. Have you ever heard about it? Yes, when I arrived in NTEC I knew it just because my brother uses to work with it. My brother is a mathematician (strange people, but I love my brother anyway). By the way, I knew how to handle computer programming languages such as MATLAB® , C++, Python and Microsoft® Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)so, for this reason, it was not a problem to learn a new one. Futhermore, R is quite easy to learn and its syntax is very similar to Python. Yes, it can be confusing  at times because it is possible to write certain commands in another language instead of the one that you are using, but basically once you know how to handle one of them, you know (almost) all. Just change the syntax of the command or the keyword which recall a specific function that you need. ...