2026 Spring Board of Advisors Meeting

The Future of Construction Engineering Research: NSF Workshop Outcomes - Presented by Dr. Lucio Soibelman, USC, Fred Champion Chair in Engineering and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Spatial Sciences Institute

• Dr. Lucio Soibelman will present the outcomes of the NSF-funded workshop, “The Future of Construction Engineering Research,” which brought together leading academics and industry experts to identify grand challenges and strategic research priorities for the construction sector. This talk will distill the workshop’s findings, highlighting research areas most relevant to capital project managers—including digital transformation, robotics and automation, workforce development, and holistic performance of the built environment.

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Southern Company Talks about their Operations Data Organization - Presented by Carl Toner, Southern Company, Generation Data Technology Manager 

• Southern Company Operations oversees nonnuclear power generation and transmission. Its executive leadership recently created the Operations Data Organization to manage asset centric data for Generation and Power Delivery throughout the asset life cycle. The team’s responsibility includes:
  • asset centric capital project delivery including digital twins 
  • legacy data remediation and contextualization for existing facilities including as-built digital twins (leveraging high resolution scanning technology) 
  • centralized asset data governance and change management 
  • Connected Worker information delivery program for Operations and Maintenance (getting information into the hands of the field workers)