ResilRoad: Journey of a SMARTI fellow

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...

Hi all, I recently took part in a great competition developed to raise awareness of the commercialisation of ideas among PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers. In this post, I decided to share this experience with you because it could be very beneficial to you or your friends doing a PhD or Postdoc in the UK. This training is called YES for Young Entrepreneur Scheme (now you get the title of the article, right? ^^). To summarise the whole experience in one sentence: YES is a unique opportunity to experience the start-up creation process and see how an idea can be transformed into a business! But why would an engineering PhD student learn about business? Well, although PhD programmes are mainly designed to prepare for research and academic roles, not all PhD students want or can pursue a career in academia. Firstly, the academic world doesn’t suit everyone (due for example to the lack of application of the work done). Secondly, there are too many PhD students for too ...

Chers tous, Cela fait déjà 9 mois que le projet a commencé et alors que je faisais un bilan de ces derniers mois, j'ai réalisé que l'une des leçons les plus importantes et inattendues que j'ai apprises est qu'en recherche, la communication est presque aussi importante que la science. Une fois les travaux de recherche effectués, ceux-ci doivent être partagés et communiqués efficacement. Il y a de nombreuses façons de le faire : articles scientifiques (évidemment), présentations en conférences, affiches de recherche, mais aussi réseaux sociaux, vidéos... Allez sur ce lien pour voir ce que la Commission européenne pense de la communication scientifique. Cependant, au-delà des travaux de recherche, il est aussi important de partager notre passion pour la science, d'informer le public sur les derniers développements technologiques et d'essayer d'inspirer les prochaines générations (même si je ne suis pas si vieux ^^). C'est dans cette optique que j'ai p...

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...

Hi all, The previous post was a brief introduction to this blog. Now, it’s time to further present my research project ResilRoad .  As I said in the previous post, I am part of a research, innovation and training programme called SMARTI. My host institution in SMARTI is the University of Nottingham (UK) , where I am enrolled as a PhD student. The University of Nottingham - founded in 1881 - is a top 20 university in the UK. One of my favourite thing about the university is the campus, which is huge, green and has amazing buildings (See for yourself in Fig. 1 and 2 ^^). Fig. 1. Portland building (University of Nottingham) Fig. 2 Yang Fujia building (University of Nottingham) My project is the 9th research project within SMARTI. Hence, you can also call me ESR9 (Early-Stage Researcher 9) though Philippe is easier I think ^^. My project ‘ ResilRoad’ is an acronym for Risk-based Resilience indicators for roadway networks . The aim is to improve risk-modelling method...