The 4th GeoSystems Engineering Annual Research Symposium was successfully held on Friday, November 20th, 2020. The event was attended by 112 people, with the proportion between academic and industry/government of about 60:40, and the proportion between the UC Berkeley community and the communities outside of about 50:50. Different from the previous years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this year the event was held virtually via Zoom. 

Following the welcome speech by Prof. Adda Athanasopoulos-Zekkos, five PhD students from our program, John Murphy, Zorana Mijic, Hanze Yao, Tessa Williams, and Andrew Yeskoo, presented their research work in the main seminar. Their presentations were followed by a virtual poster session in separate breakout rooms where 19 Ph.D. students, postdocs, and researchers presented their research progress. Here are the list of our presenters and their presentation titles:

MAIN SEMINAR:

• John Murphy "Modelling Suffusion Internal Erosion with the MPM: A Comparison between the One-point and Double-point Formulations"
• Zorana Mijic "Liquefaction Potential of Native Christchurch Silty Soils"
• Hanze Yao "Application of InSAR in earthquake liquefaction analysis"
• Tessa Williams "Displacement-Hazard Analysis of Earthen Dams"
• Andrew Yeskoo "Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing for Geotechnical Monitoring"

POSTER PRESENTATION:

• Renjie Wu “Integrating domain knowledge with deep learning models: An interpretable AI system for automatic work progress identification of NATM tunnels”
• Camilo Ignacio Pinilla Ramos "Estimation of Non-Ergodic Site Terms Using H/V Spectral Ratios from Microtremor"
• Joel Given “Sand Production and Detachment Modeling using the Material Point Method”
• Jongchan Kim "Cyclic direct simple shear response of sandy gravel from the CentrePort Wellington"
• Bodhinanda Chandra “Development of High-Performance Multi-Phase Material Point Method for Free-Surface Flow and Saturated Soil”
• Daniel Hutabarat "Seismic Response Characteristics of Liquefied Sites with and without Surficial Ejecta Manifestation"
• Weibing Gong "Comparison of Regional 3D vs 1D Stability Modeling of Landslides: The example of the 2015 Lefkada Earthquake"
• Bingyu Zhao “Modeling Camp Fire Evacuation” 
• Jhih-Rou Huang "Back-analysis of a Rapid Drawdown Failure at Sparmos Dam using UAV-based 3D Failure Geometries
• Nina Zabihi "Investigating the Simple Shear Response of Gravelly Soils Using the Discrete Element Method"
• Yong Liang “The staggered grid material point method”
• Peter Hubbard “Dynamic Strain Measurement in Pavement for Vehicle Detection, Characterization and Tracking”
• Chien-Chih Wang “Monitoring Solutions for California Natural Gas Infrastructure”
• Zhenxiang Su “Three-dimensional simulation of hydraulic fracturing in geo-materials using Lattice Element Method”
• Franklin Olaya "Amplification of ground motion due to topography and its effects on the soil-structure response of high-rise buildings"
• Ruonan Ou “Health monitoring of levee cutoff wall using distributed fiber optic sensing technology”
• Dayu Apoji “Toward Autonomous TBM – Preliminary Study of Dynamic Prediction of Shield Position for Trajectory Control”
• Chris Bain "Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering Tool for Natural Gas Storage and Pipeline Systems"
• Hayato Nonaka “Surface Seismic Measurement using Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) Technology”

This event is an annual event of the Geosystems Engineering Group that aims to show research within the group and to bridge the gap between academic research and the industry. The event’s success is well captured in the photo collage attached.

We will do this again next year! Hopefully in person!