The 2018 PEER Annual Meeting was held on January 18-19, 2018, at the International House on the UC Berkeley campus. “PEER at 21: The Practice of Performance-Based Engineering for Natural Hazards” featured the role of multi-disciplinary performance-based engineering with seismic and related natural hazards to achieve community resiliency.

 

 

 

The meeting opened on Thursday, January 18, with plenary sessions highlighting the role of PEER research in the fields of performance-based engineering and resilience, and to identify areas where research and development of technology and tools are needed for effective decision-making. Plenary sessions included presentations on the following topics:

• Earthquake Hazard Characterization
• Performance-Based Engineering: Applications
• Performance-Based Engineering: Research
• Engineering and Public Policy for Earthquake Resilient Communities

The first day concluded with the announcement and recognition of two winning teams in the 2017 Blind Prediction Contest, followed by the evening Poster Session & Reception that featured emerging research. An invitation-only dinner for PEER’s Business and Industry Partnership (BIP) program participants ended the evening.

On Friday, January 19, concurrent breakout sessions were formatted for more detailed discussion and engagement of PEER-funded researchers and projects, with the goal of creating a synergy of resources and information. Concurrent discussion topics included:

• Buildings
• Characterization of Geohazards
• Bridges
• Designing for Geohazards

The day concluded with a plenary session, “Computational Simulation,” followed by reports from the concurrent sessions and final remarks from Director Mosalam.

Both days featured Special Presentations:

• PEER – The First Decade – Jack Moehle, UC Berkeley
• Extreme Events Reconnaissance: The Promise and Possibility of Collaborative Social Science and Engineering Research – Lori Peek, Natural Hazards Center
• Learning with Confidence: Theory and Practice of Information Geometric Learning from High-dimensional Sensory Data – Lin Zhang, Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over 200 attendees at the meeting included researchers, industry stakeholders, practitioners, and students. Presentations and posters can be found on the 2018 PEER Annual Meeting website.