Professor Debra Laefer

Tying the Surface to the Subsurface -- an Emerging Paradigm Shift in Digital Twins

Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering at Tandon School of Engineering & Director of Citizen Science at Center for Urban Science and Progress, New York University

With degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (MS, PhD), NYU (MEng), and Columbia University (BS, BA), Prof. Debra Laefer has a wide-ranging background spanning from geotechnical and structural engineering to art history and historic preservation. Not surprisingly, Prof. Laefer’s work often stands at the cross-roads of technology creation and community values such as devising technical solutions for protecting architecturally significant buildings from sub-surface construction. As the density of her aerial remote sensing datasets continues to grow exponentially with time, Prof. Laefer and her Urban Modeling Group must help pioneer computationally efficient storage, querying, and visualization strategies that both harness distributed computing-based solutions and bridge the gap between data availability and its usability for the engineering community.

In her two decades as a faculty member in both the US and Europe, Prof. Laefer has authored over 200 peer reviewed publications, been awarded 5 patents, and has supervised 18 doctoral and 22 Masters theses. Her work has been featured in Forbes, National Geographic, and TechCrunch. Among many honors from IEEE, ISPRS, and other professional societies, the most notable is perhaps the 2016 commissioning and hanging of her portrait by the Royal Irish Academy as one of eight researchers selected for the Women on Walls project to celebrate Irish women in science and engineering. She was recently awarded the ASCE Harry Schnabel Jr. Award for contributions in earth retaining systems.

Abstract

Tying the Surface to the Subsurface — an Emerging Paradigm Shift in Digital Twins

While the Smart Cities movement has helped focus attention on the need for and advantage of municipal data integration, most efforts to date have concentrated on readily visible, aboveground facilities (e.g. infrastructure) and activities (e.g. traffic). While the integration of remote sensing data and dynamic data with CityGML and BIM based systems have posed definitive challenges, those are arguably relatively simple compared to the integration of subsurface data. This is true in terms of a wide range of data characteristics. These include types, quality, consistency, access, privacy, sparsity and resolution. This talk will briefly summarize aboveground data integration trends and then deeply reflect on the unique challenges that urban, subsurface data pose. Specific domain-based concerns will be introduced from the perspective of alternative energy providers, archaeologists, civil engineers, facility owners, first responders, geologists, geotechnical engineers, hydrologists, transportation providers, utility companies. Examples of the value proposition of successfully achieving this will be highlighted. Finally, the talk will highlight the state of play of current efforts in subsurface data integration by organizations like the Open Geospatial Consortium, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Utility Engineering and Surveying Institute, and the city of Flanders.

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