Mission
Given the reality of aging infrastructure across the US, advances and deployments of the latest in sensor technology and enabling digital tools such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital twins offer the possibility to realize a new paradigm in next generation intelligent infrastructure across various sectors. INSITES mission is to develop the underlying workforce required to successfully realize this vision through engagement in research, development, and deployment of new technologies for infrastructure sensing applications.
Effective preparation of the INSITES workforce of the future necessarily includes training and educating highly skilled, interdisciplinary scientists and engineers capable of working at interfaces between disciplines. Successful development, maturation, and deployment of advanced technologies through research and education also requires engagement and collaboration between university, industry and government. In short, INSITES consortium seeks to convene stakeholders, educate the next generation workforce, and deploy novel technology enabling a new era of intelligent infrastructure.
Vision
- Foundational research with a diverse base of funding support spanning government, private, foundation, and other resources.
- Expand and strengthen multi- and interdisciplinary educational programs as well as internship and coop opportunities for students.
- Direct support of industry research and workforce development needs in the form of publications, patents, talent, and fee-for-service.
- Harnessing the full breadth and depth of scientific and engineering expertise across the University of Pittsburgh and other academic partners.
- Successful development and deployment of multiple sensing platforms with spatially distributed sensing capability and coupling physics-based modeling and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled sensor networks for specific infrastructure needs
Goals
- Develop novel sensor technologies as solutions to infrastructure sensing needs
- Provide highly qualified and interdisciplinary talent to the infrastructure monitoring industry, having impacts across energy, transportation, civil and other sectors.
- Facilitate a community of stakeholders and partners across university / industry / government segments to maximize impacts and facilitate technology transfer.
- Become a premier source of university technical support to industry (papers, patents, direct research support), regarding advanced sensor technologies.
Impact
- Formation of highly qualified workforce, leaders of next generation infrastructure
- Predictive monitoring before infrastructure failures occur (structural, electrical, etc.)
- Detection and Mitigation of environmental contamination and associated risks
- Enable and enhance robust and resilient energy storage, transport, and delivery systems, including electricity, natural gas, and H2
- Leveraging advances in new technologies across infrastructure segments, accelerating time to deployment and enhancing resilience and security broadly
