ResilRoad: Journey of a SMARTI fellow

Hello guys, I think that it’s time to properly talk to you about my secondment (or research visit) at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Seville (Spain). This visit started in November 2018 and lasted seven months. It was an amazing experience both professionally and personally. To summarise this experience, I thought that I could answer four questions: What is the JRC? The Joint Research Centre (JRC) is the European Commission's science and knowledge service. The JRC aims to provide EU and national authorities with independent scientific evidence and support to help tackle big challenges facing society. To this end, the thousands of scientists working at the JRC create, manage and make sense of knowledge, and develop innovative tools for policymakers. The JRC’s headquarters are in Brussels (like most of the EU institutions) but the JRC also has research facilities in Geel (Belgium), Ispra (Italy), Karlsruhe (Germany), Petten (the Netherlands), and Seville (Sp...

Hello guys, it's been a while! I've been very busy these past few months working on my project, learning to code in R, going on secondment or conferences, writing papers and the list goes on...In this post, I will give you some updates on my journey. This post is an adaptation from an interview that I gave on smarti.eu (http://www.smartietn.eu/2019/06/30/smarti-etn-fellows-where-are-we-now-part-2/). What is the main achievement until now in terms of research? During the first year of the project, I conducted a literature review on existing resilience assessment methods for road networks, which allowed me to explore the research challenges related to this topic. Then, I developed novel and robust resilience indicators tailored to road networks. This work resulted in a conference paper accepted for the 2019 International Conference on Smart Cities (Seoul) . Besides, I am currently developing a novel approach to investigate the sensitivity of network performance to differen...

En septembre dernier, j'ai donné une courte présentation sur mon projet de recherche ResilRoad à la Summer School 2018 de SMARTI à Palerme (Italie). À la suite de ma présentation, on m'a notamment posé la question suivante : quel pourrait être l’impact de votre projet de recherche ? J’ai pensé qu'il serait intéressant de partager la réponse à cette question dans l'article d'aujourd'hui. J'explorerai de manière plus générale l'apport possible de la recherche sur la résilience des infrastructures à la société. Premièrement, cette question est très pertinente car mon projet est plutôt théorique. L’objectif est de développer une méthodologie permettant d’évaluer la résilience des réseaux routiers, ce qui est plus difficile à appréhender que des sujets de recherche axés sur le développement de prototypes ou la réalisation d’essais en laboratoire. Mon projet repose sur l'idée que les réseaux routiers (comme tout système d'ingénierie) ont une pr...

  Last September, I gave a short presentation about my research project ResilRoad (Risk-based Resilience indicators for Roadway networks) at the SMARTI Summer School 2018 in Palermo (Italy). Following my presentation, one of the questions from the audience was: What could be the impact of your research project? I thought that it could be interesting to share the answer to this question in today's post. I will more generally explore the possible contribution of research on infrastructure resilience to society. Firstly, this question makes a lot of sense because my project is rather theoretical. The aim is to develop a methodology to asses road-network resilience, which is something that cannot be easily apprehended compared to research topics that focus on developing prototypes or performing laboratory tests. The idea behind my project is that road networks (like any other engineering systems) have a property called resilience, which represents their ability to sustain, ...

Hi all, It's been 9th months into the project and as I reflect on the past months, I realise that one of the most important and unexpected lesson that I have learned is that in research, communication is almost as important as science. Once the research is done, it needs to be effectively shared and communicated. There is plenty of ways to do that: scientific papers (obviously), conference presentations, research posters, social media, videos... Follow this link to a short video to see what the European Commission thinks about Science communication. However, beyond research, it is important to share our passion for science, inform the general public about technological developments, and try to inspire the next generations (even though I am not that old, yet ^^). For this reason, I took part in the 2018 Open Days of the University of Nottingham (my host institution for SMARTI) last Friday and Saturday. During the Open Days, universities welcome prospective high-school student...

Dear all,   Welcome to my blog! My name is Philippe and I am a 26-year-old graduate civil engineer. I recently started the superb adventure that is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie INNOVATIVE TRAINING NETWORK (MSCA ITN ).   For those of you who don’t know, MSCA ITNs are structured training of early-stage researchers funded by the European Commission. The objective of MSCA ITNs is to train young researchers, entrepreneurs and engineers to face today's and tomorrow's challenges. In the long run, this training should benefit society. In practice, an MSCA ITN is an amazing opportunity to work for three years as a researcher, get a PhD, collaborate with companies and universities across Europe, develop technical and interpersonal skills… and last but not least this comes with a competitive salary! My ITN is called SMARTI (Sustainable Multi-functional Automated Resilient Transport Infrastructure). Follow this link to our website to get more information about the programme. I am ...