AUS holds International Conference on Infrastructure Management, Assessment and Rehabilitation Techniques

American University of Sharjah (AUS) opened the Second International Conference on Infrastructure Management, Assessment and Rehabilitation Techniques (ICIMART'16) today, Tuesday, March 8, 2016 in the Main Building. Organized by the College of Engineering (CEN), ICIMART serves as a forum for scientists and engineers engaged in research and development to present their latest work on infrastructure management, assessment and rehabilitation techniques.

In his address at the conference's opening ceremony, Dr. Björn Kjerfve, AUS Chancellor, welcomed the participants. "It is a pleasure to welcome more than 40 participating scientists and engineers from over 30 countries around the world to the AUS campus. In the short time span since November 2015, the College of Engineering has held no less than nine international conferences, and I would like to thank them for their efforts and hard work," he said. The conference will continue through March 9, 2016.

Keynote speakers of the conference include Dr. Nenad Gucunski, Professor and Chairman of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rutgers University and the Director of Infrastructure Condition Monitoring Program at Rutgers' Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT); Dr. Khaled Galal, Professor in the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering at Concordia University; and György L. Balázs, a professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary where his main fields of research include experimental and analytical studies on concrete, reinforced concrete, durability, fire behavior and design, bond and cracking, high performance concrete, sustainability and more.

The conference topics included infrastructure design and rehabilitation and management such as design theories and practices, case histories, infrastructure rehabilitation, decision support systems, lifecycle cost analysis. Topics also included nondestructive testing and evaluation techniques for infrastructure, such as infrastructure assessment and condition evaluation, material characterization, and signal and image processing for infrastructure assessment.