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A Berkeley Short Course
Monday - Thursday, November 17 - 20, 2025 (LIVE) & Recorded
Where: Online via ZOOM platform
why this course
why this course
The pace of technological innovation and scientific progress has led to new technologies to monitor civil infrastructure and the environment. These technologies provide, in many cases, unprecedented opportunities for sensing and understanding of the way civil infrastructure responds to natural hazards, environmental stressors such as climate change, and human activities.
This 4-day online short course improves on previous versions of the course offered in January 2021, May 2021 and May 2022, May 2023. (see feedback here) and is expected to be offered once this year.
The course will provide a review of some of these technologies that are about to, or are already impacting the way we design, maintain, or operate geo-infrastructure and the way we manage risk. The instructors have significant expertise in the technologies presented and will outline the principles of operation and the advantages and disadvantages, as well as share examples of projects and case histories where these technologies have been successfully implemented.
Short Course Participant Survey Results
Instructors
Instructors
Dimitrios Zekkos, PhD, PE
University of California at Berkeley (short course lead)
Robert Kayen, PhD
USGS and University of California at Berkeley (instructor)
Kenichi Soga, PhD, FREng, FASCE, FICE
University of California (instructor)
Kenneth Johnson, PhD, CEG, PE
WSP USA (instructor)
Course Objectives
Course Objectives
The objective of this course is to introduce a wide range of new technologies for geo-infrastructure monitoring and how they fit in a geotechnical engineer’s toolbox. Specific course objectives:
Introduce the concepts of digital twins and the new observational method
Understand the principles of operation of each technology and its advantages and limitations
Review examples of applications of the technologies in actual geotechnical projects
Provide guidance on how one could implement these technologies in engineering practice.
course outline
course outline
Part 1: Introduction, Robots, UAVs, & Optical Data Displacements
Introduction – Welcome
Review of Current and New Technologies and Hierarchy– Digital Twins and data management frameworks – New Observational Method
Means for Sensing
Satellites
Aerial
Terrestrial
Robots & UAVs
In-situ
Part 2: 3D data, Displacements and Strains
UAVs and Optical data collection
Structure-from-Motion
LiDAR
RTK GPS
Data Analysis using 3D models
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)
Infrared - Principles and Applications
Part 3: Remote and non-contact Multi-Sensing
Wireless Sensing applications – Principles and Applications
The ShapeArray
Distributed Fiber Optics
Part 4: Embedded Sensing & Conclusions
Putting it all together–how to optimize your design using monitoring data
Course CONTENT DELIVERY METHOD
Course CONTENT DELIVERY METHOD
By registering to the course you can get the course content in two ways:
Live (synchronous) from 8:00 to 12:15 Pacific time on November 17-19, 2025 and from 8:00 to 13:45 on November 20, 2025.
Recorded lectures that will remain available for one month after the Live version of the course. This has been shown to to facilitate particularly participants in different time zones.
In addition, the course includes significant time for discussion and consultations in joint rooms and break-out rooms with the instructors.
COURSE PROGRAM
COURSE PROGRAM
All times listed are Pacific Standard Time
DAY 1 – Monday November 17 2025
Part 1: Introduction, Robots, UAVs, & Optical Data Displacements
8:00-8:15: Introduction – Welcome (Zekkos)
8:15-8:45: Why Monitor? (Soga)
8:45-9:15: RTK GPS (Kayen)
9:15-10:15: Robots & UAVs (Zekkos)
10:15-11:30 Optical data collection & Structure-from-Motion (Zekkos)
11:30-12:15 Panel Discussion
DAY 2 – TUESDAY November 18 2025
Part 2: 3D data, Displacements and Strains
8:00-9:00: Case Histories with 3D Data Analysis (Zekkos)
9:00-10:00 LiDAR (Kayen)
10:00-10:30 Setting the threshold and limit levels of monitoring (Soga)
10:30-11:30 Case History Dive-in: Tunnel Monitoring 1 (Johnson)
11:30-12:15 Panel Discussion
DAY 3 – WEDNESDAY November 19 2025
Part 3: Remote and non-contact Multi-Sensing
8:00-9:00: UAV-based Infrared & Multispectral Sensing– Principles & Applications (Zekkos)
9:00-10:00: Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) (Kayen)
10:00-10:30 Case History: Geomatics applications (Kayen)
10:30-11:30 Case History Dive-in: The Edenville Dam Failure Characterization (Zekkos)
11:30-12:15 Panel Discussion
DAY 4 – Thursday November 20 2025
Part 4: Embedded Sensing & Conclusions
8:00-9:00 Fiber Optics and the role of distributed sensing (Soga)
9:00-9:30 Case History Dive-in: Soil-pile interaction monitoring (Soga)
9:30-10:30 The ShapeArray (Johnson)
10:30- 11:30 Wireless sensor network (Soga)
11:30-12:00 Case History Dive-in: Deep excavation and tunnel monitoring (Soga)
12:00-13:00 Putting it all together: Digital Twins & Multi-Scale Monitoring Frameworks (Zekkos)
13:00-13:45 Panel Discussion
DELIVERABLES
DELIVERABLES
14 hrs of online lectures – Available for real-time during the course delivery as well as non-real-time (i.e., asynchronous). Registered participants will be able to view the presentations for an entire month following the completion of the course through a password-protected website.
700+ course slides
Recommended Technical literature for each specific technology/theme
Office hours (instructors available for discussion in break-out rooms at the end of each day of course delivery, as well as a week later)
Certificate of attendance by the Short Course Organizer
Certificate for 8 PDH hours
COURSE COST
COURSE COST
The cost of this two-day course is $985. A limited number of spots are available for students after coordination with the short course leader.
A 10% reduction in cost is provided for 3-4 registrations and a 20% off for 5+ registrations (if paid at the same time during course registration).
Refund Policy: Course registration can be fully refunded based on requests made until November 3 2025 (two weeks before short course).
COURSE REGISTRATION
COURSE REGISTRATION
Registration deadline is November 10 2025, unless the course becomes fully-booked earlier. Please note that the previous two courses in 2022 and 2023 were fully booked before the deadline. We also do not expect to offer this course a second time in 2025.
CONTACT
CONTACT
For questions related to this short course, please contact the short course leader Prof. Dimitrios Zekkos (zekkos@berkeley.edu)
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