Largest-Ever Conference for Structural Safety & Reliability Held at Columbia Engineering
The 2013 International Conference for Structural Safety and Reliability (ICOSSAR2013), chaired by George Deodatis, the Santiago and Robertina Calatrava Family Professor of Civil Engineering, was held June 16 to 20 at Columbia Engineering. Organized by the International Association for Structural Safety and Reliability (IASSAR), ICOSSAR is the largest conference in its field and is held every four years.
Prof. George Deodatis chaired the conference, held June 16 to 20 at Columbia Engineering.
With more than 700 participants, this year’s conference was the best attended ever. Most of the participants were university professors, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students, along with several officials from federal and state agencies, engineers from the consulting industry, and research scholars.
“The quality and diversity of the papers presented were very high, and there were many lively discussions both during the technical sessions and during the social functions of the conference," says Deodatis.
The conference featured 145 sessions, including 35 organized sessions and mini-symposia, and over 800 papers. A major focus was on risk analysis and risk management of the civil infrastructure to safeguard against a range of issues, including terrorism, climate change, infrastructure aging, and natural hazards such as earthquakes, wind, ocean, and waves. Other popular topics were infrastructure health monitoring and life-cycle cost analysis.
Six keynote lectures were given at ICOSSAR, including the Alfred Freudenthal Lecture (named after the late Alfred M. Freudenthal, civil engineering professor at the School presented by Henrik Madsen, the Group CEO of Det Norske Veritas on “Managing Structural Safety and Reliability in Adaptation to Climate Change.”
“A lot of people worked very hard for the success of the conference and IASSAR is very grateful for their effort and time,” adds Deodatis. “We are looking forward to meeting at the next ICOSSAR in Vienna in 2017 and seeing how much the field advances in the coming four years. "