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February 19, 2020

The 2020 PEER Annual Meeting with the theme of “The Future of Performance-Based Natural Hazards Engineering” was held on January 16 & 17, 2020. Please see the summary of first day morning & afternoon.

PEER has recently formed three committees comprised of researchers and industry practitioners. The three committees are the Research Committee, Industry Advisory Board, and Resource identification Committee. The committees and their charges are presented below, and these three committees' ex-officio members are: Norm Abrahamson, Leader of PEER Lifelines Research Program; Amarnath Kasalanati, PEER Associate Director; Khalid Mosalam, PEER Director; Tom Shantz, Manager of PEER funding from Caltrans.

February 12, 2020

The PEER Annual Meeting 2020 with the theme of “The Future of Performance-Based Natural Hazards Engineering” was held on January 16 & 17, 2020. Please see the summary of first two plenaries here. The afternoon of Day 1 focused on Modeling & Simulation.

February 11, 2020

PHI-Net FrameworkPEER Hub ImageNet (Φ-Net or PHI-Net/ is a general automated framework (see figure) for vision-based structural health monitoring (SHM) and rapid damage assessment after disasters. Based on past reconnaissance efforts and related studies, Φ-Net represents the vision-based detection tasks by a tree-like hierarchy framework.

February 7, 2020

Five PEER colleagues were recently honored with election to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), which is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.

February 5, 2020

PEER Director, Khalid MosalamThe PEER Annual Meeting 2020 with the theme of “The Future of Performance-Based Natural Hazards Engineering” was held on January 16 & 17, 2020. Tsu-Jae King Liu, Dean of Engineering at UC Berkeley, opened the meeting highlighting the contributions of PEER since its inception 23 years ago.

February 4, 2020

Kiremidjian Stanford PEER Institutional Board ChairAnne S. Kiremidjian, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, has been selected by EERI as an Honorary Member.  This award is bestowed upon members who have made sustained and outstanding contributions to the field of earthquake engineering and to EERI.

January 10, 2020

PEER has just published Report No. 2019/07: "PEER Hub ImageNet (Ø-Net): A Large-Scale Multi-Attribute Benchmark Dataset of Structural Images." It was authored by Yuqing Gao and Khalid M. Mosalam.

Visit the PEER publications page to download a free color pdf of the document.

Abstract

December 16, 2019

StEER logoThe Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network has issued an Event Briefing for the November 26, 2019 M6.4 earthquake in Albania. Event Briefings  are typically released within 48 hours of an event for which StEER will not deploy virtual or field assessment teams, but still warrants some commentary.

December 10, 2019

December 9, 2019

PEER has been endorsed as an Affiliate organization of QuakeCoRE, New Zealand Centre for Earthquake Resilience. This endorsement was recently confirmed by the Directors and Board of QuakeCoRE.

November 5, 2019

An agreement of academic collaboration has been signed between PEER and the following five Japanese research institutions:

November 4, 2019

CMU logoCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) has joined PEER as an educational affiliate. CMU faculty have expertise mutually beneficial to the PEER community in the following topics:

  • post-earthquake building damage diagnosis and loss estimation

October 30, 2019

Key Lessons

❏   At the end of October, three significant fires took place in California, namely the Kincade Fire in Northern California and the Tick and Getty fires in Southern California, fueled by high speed winds with heated air blowing from inland to the ocean. California Governor Gavin Newsom declared statewide emergency due to fires and extreme weather conditions (CA Gov, 2019). PG&E shut down power for an estimated 2.35 million people across 38 counties at the same time increasing the severity of the situation.

October 24, 2019

SMU logoSouthern Methodist University (SMU) has joined PEER as an educational affiliate. SMU faculty have expertise mutually beneficial to the PEER community in the following topics:

PEER’s Transportation Systems Research Program (TSRP) was highlighted in a keynote presentation given by Dawn Lehman, Professor at the University of Washington, at the 2019 Third International Bridge Seismic Workshop held at the University of Washington on October 2-3, 2019.

October 23, 2019

October 4, 2019

PEER has just published Report No. 2019/06: "Fluid-Structure Interaction and Python-Scripting Capabilities in OpenSees." It was authored by Minjie Zhu and Michael H. Scott, School of Civil and Construction Engineering Oregon State University

Visit the PEER publications page to download a free color pdf of the document.

Abstract

September 26, 2019

The impact of a PEER funded research project "Establishing Bridge Column Capacity Limit States through Modeling and Simulation" is highlighted below. The project Principal Investigator (PI) is Sashi K. Kunnath, Professor of Civil Engineering, UC Davis. The research team includes Jin Zhou, Graduate Student Researcher, UC Davis.

Download the Research Project Highlight which includes the abstract. (PDF)

Research Impact: