Friday 8 May 2026 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Seminar Room, Civil Engineering Building, University of Cambridge
About
The DRF Lunchtime Clinic is delighted to welcome Prof Thomas NG, Chair Professor of Smart and Sustainable Construction at City University of Hong Kong, who will speak on Improving the Reliability, Efficiency, Adaptability and Liveability of the Built Environment through Digital Intelligence.
About the talk
Reliable, efficient, adaptive and liveable built environment is crucial to the development of a city and the well-being of citizens. Despite an increasing adoption of building information modelling, geographic information system, internet-of-things, and computer vision for the planning, design, construction, and operation and maintenance of infrastructure and building facilities, more effort should be directed to uncover the interdependency of infrastructure systems and building components as well as the relationship between the built facilities and people so that reliable decision systems can be developed to tackle the grand challenge of sustainability, resilience and smart city development. In this seminar, the speaker will share his aspiration on developing a digital intelligent platform for various infrastructure and building facilities. Through digital twin, useful data can be gathered while insights can be generated to help develop intelligent decisions to help ensure the built environment is more ready to respond to climate change, manmade events and user demand. Case examples will be provided to illustrate how digital intelligence can be applied in practice.
About the speaker
Prof. Ng is Chair Professor of Smart and Sustainable Construction at City University of Hong Kong. His research interests cover a wide range of topics not least low carbon built environment, community resilience, smart city, construction informatics, infrastructure asset management, construction productivity, etc. Over the years, Thomas has secured more than a hundred competitive research grants amounting to over GBP 16 million. He has published over 300 refereed journal papers and another 200 scholarly items. Prof. Ng is a Member of Technical Committee of Thermal Performance and Energy Use in the Built Environment set up by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO/TC163), and he is Fellow of Institution of Civil Engineers, Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and Chartered Institute of Building.