Alum Pingbo Tang Joins CEE as Associate Professor

CEE is pleased to welcome Pingbo Tang as an Associate Professor.

Tang earned his PhD in CEE in 2009. Tang, whose PhD dissertation explored the extraction of surveying goals from point clouds obtained from laser scanners to support bridge inspection, previously taught at Arizona State University and Western Michigan University. Tang’s research focus includes computer vision, pattern recognition, and data science for civil infrastructure systems. He’s also interested in human technology and human systems engineering within civil engineering—as well as automation and robotics in construction and civil infrastructure operations.

At CEE, he plans to incorporate the use of gaming tools for infrastructure engineering and management education and practice. “I plan to extend virtual reality and augmented reality games into group decision-making modes to have students team up and compete against each other,” he says. The goal is to achieve high performance in condition assessment of structures, cash flow diagnosis, construction safety inspection, and workspace arrangement for productivity.

“Pingbo Tang has an impressive record of innovation in bringing advanced technology into infrastructure engineering, construction, and operation,” said Dave Dzombak, Hamerschlag University Professor and Department Head. “Pingbo will complement nicely existing strengths in our faculty, and help us move into new areas.”

Tang says he is excited to return to CEE as an instructor, working with the school’s computer science and robotics programs to train civil and environmental engineering researchers to integrate artificial intelligence, robotics, sensing technology, and human-computer interactions into a wide range of applications.

Tang says that his teaching style makes the classroom more interactive through the use of discussions and hands-on experiments. He utilizes interdisciplinary discussion and creative thinking in the classroom—integrating computational models, data science, and human systems engineering into engineering and project management decision-making scenarios.

“CEE prepares civil and environmental engineers to face the challenges of operating and maintaining complex interdependent and aging civil infrastructure systems. The CEE program creates well-rounded engineers that not only have technical capabilities, but also strong leadership skills needed to lead society into a sustainable future.”