Bio
Dr. Alessandro Sabato earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Calabria, Italy, in December 2014. During his doctoral studies, he spent 18 months at Columbia University as a visiting Ph.D. student and Research Associate working on experimental testing for vibration-based monitoring of heritage buildings and oil drilling pipelines. In October 2015, Dr. Sabato joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell) as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. At UMass Lowell, he investigated innovative sensing for structural evaluation using i) computer vision, ii) unmanned aerial vehicles, and iii) MEMS devices. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the same university, working on integrating noncontact, wireless, and computer vision techniques with unmanned vehicles for automated assessment of large-scale engineering systems. His research interests include acoustics, machine learning, nondestructive evaluation, sensors development, smart structures, structural dynamics, and structural health monitoring. Dr. Sabato and his research group have received funds from federal agencies, private companies, and industrial partners to progress data analytics and solutions in thrust areas, which perfectly align with his research interests. More information about his group’s past and current projects can be found at https://sites.uml.edu/alessandro-sabato/.

Bio
Dr. Krzysztof Holak received a Ph.D. in Automatic and Robotics from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow (AGH UST), Poland, in April 2013. In February 2017, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the same university. His research interests include application of image processing methods and computer vision technology to the problems of mechanical and civil engineering, mainly in damage detection, nondestructive testing, and structural health monitoring. He also conducts studies in the field of vision system for robotics and medical image processing. Since his Ph.D. studies, Dr. Holak has participated in many scientific projects in a collaboration with researchers from his university, other academic institutions (Rzeszow University of Technology, Cracow University of Technology, Warsaw University of Technology and Jagiellonian University College of Medicine) as well as industry and private companies. Recently, he has become a Principal Investigator of a research project funded by the National Center for Research and Development in Poland. The main scientific goal of the project is the application of video processing and motion magnification techniques in damage detection using AI methods. He is also a lecturer at AGH UST, and his teaching activities include, among others, signal and image processing courses.

Bio
B.F. Spencer, Jr. received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985. He worked in the faculty at the University of Notre Dame for 17 years before returning to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he currently holds the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering and is the former Director of the Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory. His research has been primarily in the areas of structural health monitoring, structural control, cyberinfrastructure applications, stochastic fatigue, stochastic computational mechanics, and natural hazard mitigation. Dr. Spencer has directed more than USD 60M in funded research and published more than 700 technical papers/reports, including two books. He was the first to study and design magnetorheological (MR) fluid dampers for the protection of structures against earthquakes and strong winds, overcoming the inherent limitations of existing passive energy dissipation systems, as well as power-dependent active control systems, which are in common use today. He led NSF's George E. Brown Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) system integration project, which constituted the nation's first engineering cyberinfrastructure initiative. His research on structural health monitoring systems and smart wireless sensors integrates advanced computing tools with smart sensors to provide a functional platform with self-interrogation capabilities. Dr. Spencer has received numerous awards, including the ASCE Outstanding Instructor Award, the ASCE Norman Medal, the ASCE Housner Structural Control and Monitoring Medal, the ASCE Newmark Medal, the Zhu Kezhen International Lectureship Award, the ANCRiSST Outstanding Senior Investigator Award, the Structural Health Monitoring Person of the Year Award, the J.M. Ko Medal of Advances in Structural Engineering, the IASCM Takuji Kobori Prize, and the Raymond & Sidney Epstein Structural Engineering Faculty Award.