NSF funding allows collaboration with UNO to improve bridge monitoring

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on Wednesday funding for a collaboration between faculty from UNL's Department of Civil Engineering and UNO's College of Information Science & Technology to use Big Data to improve the way bridge infrastructure is monitored for potential failures.

An award of nearly $100,000 for the project, titled "Big Data Innovations for Bridge Health", was featured in an NSF announcement highlighting awards to 10 Big Data Spokes in areas identified by NSF's Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs initiative. The BD Hubs program was created in 2012 to leverage Big Data through multi-sector collaborations between academia, industry and government within four regions of the United States: South, West, Midwest and Northeast.

The project is also part of the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative, an effort to solve the nation’s challenges by using insights gained through digital data.

“The award allows us to further examine, collaborate and develop plans for improving methodologies used to address bridge and infrastructure condition evaluation, deficiency identification, service-life extension and, ultimately, improved management of our transportation system,” said Linzell, department chair and professor of civil engineering at UNL, said. “The collaboration between the UNO College of Information Science and Technology and the UNL Department of Civil Engineering certainly affords an excellent opportunity for these two entities to continue addressing this issue.”

UNL's Linzell and Chungwook Sim, assistant professor of civil engineering, are co-principal investigators on the project. Robin Gandhi, associate professor of information assurance at UNO, is the lead investigator.