colincaprani.com

Most of the presentations I’ve made over the years are available here in PDF format. This means that some slides may look strange without the animation of PowerPoint. The papers relating to the presentations given at conferences are also linked. Some presentations are not highly technical but more about the generalities of structural engineering. There is some repetition across the presentations to explain the background to the research each time.

As an aside, the well-respected lone voice of Edward Tufte should be heard on the evils wrought by PowerPoint. He even goes as far as indicting it as complicit in the Challenger disaster due to its inability to convey complex information. Read an extract from his essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within here. It is essential reading for anyone involved in making technical presentations. Though since I’ve only recently discovered this, the presentations below are surely guilty of Tufte-crimes!

Research Presentations

2009 – International Conference on Structural Safety & Reliability, Osaka, Japan
The presentation of the paper ‘Estimating Extreme Highway Bridge Traffic Load Effect’.

2008 – Civil and Structural Health Monitoring 2, Toarmina, Sicily
The presentation of the paper ‘Recent advances in the Governing Form of Traffic for Bridge Loading’.

2006 – 3rd International ASRANet Colloquium, Glasgow
This is the presentation of the paper ‘Finding the Distribution of Bridge Lifetime Load Effect by Predictive Likelihood’ here.

2006 – SAMARIS Final Meeting, Ljubljana
A poster presentation on our appendix to the SAMARIS final report.

2006 – 3rd Symposium on Bridge Research in Ireland, Dublin
Presentation of the paper ‘Bridge traffic loading: the implications of some recent findings’ here. This is a paper that both summarizes our findings to-date and looks forward to see their implications for future research.

2006 – University College Dublin, Dept. of Civil Engineering, Dublin
This is a paper that outlines the direction of future research into traffic loading on highway bridges.

2005 – SAMARIS Working Group, Barcelona
A fairly informal presentation on the initial results that finally led to the journal paper ‘Bridge assessment loading: a comparison of west and central/east Europe’ , available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15732480600578451.

2004 – Institution of Structural Engineers, Young Researchers Conference, London
A presentation to other PhD researchers and senior members of the IStructE. This presentation was awarded 2nd prize in the conference.

2004 – Bridge Research Group, University College Dublin, Dublin
A presentation to peers in UCD on the state of the research to-date.

2003 – 3rd Int. Conf. on Current and Future Trends in Bridge Design, Construction and Maintenance, Shanghai
The presentation corresponding to the paper ‘Site-specific probabilistic bridge load assessment’.

2002 – 6th Int. Conf. on Computational Structures Technology, Prague
The presentation corresponding to the paper ‘Critical loading events for the assessment of medium span bridges’. Note that some of the procedures in this paper have been bettered by the more recent research.

General Presentations

2007 – Coláiste Cois Life, 5th and 6th Year Second Level Honours Maths Students, Dublin
This presentation was given during maths week, October 2007, to give these students an idea of the uses which the maths they are studying has in structural engineering. For some students the Leaving Cert topics can seem removed from real life; hopefully this presentation removes that illusion.

2006 – University College Cork, Dept. of Civil Engineering, Cork
This presentation is on Experiment and Theory in Innovative Structural Engineering and involves general discussion of structural engineering.

2006 – Dublin Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil/Structural Engineering, Dublin
This presentation is titled Advances in Structural Analysis and outlines historical progress in the area, as well as looking forward (with some slight bias given my research area!) to areas where most future progress lies.