AI: An Emerging Technology for Asset Management

Moderator: Jeff Purdy, PE, Associate Vice President, IIS Operations Manager, Intelligent Infrastructure Systems

TBD

• Stew Frick, Roadbotics

Efforts in Data Science for FHWA’s Asphalt Materials Research Program

• David Mensching, Federal Highway Administration

An AI Optimization Approach for Infrastructure Asset Management Through Deep Reinforcement Learning

• Konstantinos Papakonstantinou, Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Penn State

Bios

David Mensching is the Asphalt Materials Research Program Manager for the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). He is the director of Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center’s Asphalt Binder and Mixture Laboratory and has research interests in automation and data science, connected pavements, resilience, and performance specifications.  He is the chair of the Transportation Research Board’s Standing Committee on Binders for Flexible Pavement and an active member of the Association of Asphalt Paving Technologists. Mensching holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Villanova University and a doctoral degree from the University of New Hampshire. He is a licensed professional engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia. 

Kostas Papakonstantinou is an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at Penn State. He obtained a five-year diploma in Civil Engineering and a Master of Science in Structural Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, and master’s and doctoral degrees in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining Penn State, he was an Associate Research Scientist at the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University. Papakonstantinou’s work focuses on probabilistic analysis and stochastic mechanics, decision-making under uncertainty, machine learning, optimization/inverse methods, and their integration with computational structural mechanics and engineering applications. Papakonstantinou has received various awards for his work in these areas, including an NSF CAREER award, a fellowship award by the Institute of International Education and the Fulbright Foundation, an editor’s choice paper award from the Journal of Engineering Mechanics, and several student awards for joint work and co-authored papers.