Hands-on Workshops
University of California, Los Angeles
8:00 - 12 pm, February 5, 2025
404 Westwood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90095 (across the street from the Luskin Center),
Mong Auditorium, Building VI, Room 180
Cost: $30 on or before Nov 1 (early-bird) and $50 through Nov 20
Abstract:
This workshop provides a comprehensive introduction to the application of street view imaging systems in natural hazard research and assessment. Participants will gain hands-on experience with state-of-the-art street view data collection techniques, post-processing methods, and machine learning tools for extracting valuable information from street-level imagery.
The workshop will cover:
This workshop is designed for engineers and scientists working in the natural hazards field who seek to incorporate advanced imaging and data analysis techniques into their research and assessment workflows. Participants will leave with a solid foundation for implementing these tools in their own work, enhancing their ability to identify, quantify, and mitigate potential hazards in urban and rural environments.
The RAPID Facility enables transformative research by equipping natural hazard and disaster researchers with essential resources to collect, process, and analyze perishable data from extreme events. These comprehensive open datasets enable the development and calibration of scientific natural hazard simulation models. Our work supports NSF-supported researchers, extreme event reconnaissance (EER) organizations, and federal agencies.
Questions? Email uwrapid@uw.edu
University of California, Los Angeles
12:30 - 5:30 pm, February 5, 2025
404 Westwood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90095 (across the street from the Luskin Center),
Engineering Building VI
Cost: $30 on or before Nov 1 (early-bird) and $50 through Nov 20
Objectives
Agenda
| 12:30 pm | Welcome and NHERI Overview | |
| 1:15 | Session 1: Navigating quoFEM for Uncertainty Quantification | Mong Auditorium, Room 180 |
| 2:15 | Break | |
| 2:30 | Session 2 | |
| Track 1: Storm surge modeling and data analysis using ADCIRC on DesignSafe | Room 100 | |
| Track 2: Navigating the R2D Tool and BRAILS for regional simulations and inventory development | Room 180 | |
| Track 3: Navigating WE-UQ for wind engineering | Room 364 | |
| Track 4: Navigating Hydro-UQ for hydrodynamics | Room 300 | |
| Track 5: Navigating EE-UQ and PBE Application for earthquake engineering | Conference room 289 | |
| Track 6: Leveraging DesignSafe HPC Resources using OpenSees in both Structural and Geotechnical modeling | Tannas Alumni Suite | |
| 3:40 | Break and Refreshments | Lobby Breezeway |
| 4:00 | Session 3 (These tracks are duplicates of Session 2, providing you the flexibility to attend multiple tracks.) | |
| Track 1: Storm surge modeling and data analysis using ADCIRC on DesignSafe | Room 100 | |
| Track 2: Navigating the R2D Tool and BRAILS for regional simulations and inventory development | Room 180 | |
| Track 3: Navigating WE-UQ for wind engineering | Room 364 | |
| Track 4: Navigating Hydro-UQ for hydrodynamics | Room 300 | |
| Track 5: Navigating EE-UQ and PBE Application for earthquake engineering | Conference room 289 | |
| Track 6: Leveraging DesignSafe HPC Resources using OpenSees in both Structural and Geotechnical modeling | Tannas Alumni Suite | |
| 5:00 | Break | |
| 5:10 | Discussion: Accelerating research, contributing your work, and feedback. | Mong Auditorium |
| 5:30 | Workshop closure |
Questions? Email nheri-simcenter@berkeley.edu
This session provides an overview of the BRAILS and R2D tools developed by SimCenter, highlighting their individual capabilities and how they can be integrated for comprehensive natural hazard loss assessments. BRAILS is a powerful computational engine designed to automatically generate detailed inventories of building and infrastructure elements. R2D is a desktop software application that integrates BRAILS and other tools/libraries for characterizing hazard events, and simulating damage and losses across large inventories of buildings and civil infrastructure. Recent enhancements have expanded the capabilities of both BRAILS and R2D to assess the post-disaster performance of transportation and lifeline infrastructure systems and simulate community recovery. Through user experiences, this session will highlight how BRAILS and R2D support research and teaching in regional natural hazard simulation and assessment, offering powerful tools for improving resilience and risk evaluation.
This session introduces SimCenter’s quoFEM application, a tool designed to enable Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) analyses for computational simulation models. Through its graphical interface, quoFEM guides users through four steps in setting up UQ analyses: selecting a UQ algorithm and options, specifying model scripts, defining input probability distributions, and identifying model outputs.
With quoFEM, users can propagate uncertainties in both model parameters and the models themselves, evaluating their impact on quantities of interest. If data is available, quoFEM also supports updating these uncertainty distributions. To handle the computational demands of UQ analyses, quoFEM enables seamless job execution on high-performance computing resources through DesignSafe, accessible directly from the user’s local computer.
This session will showcase a variety of UQ analysis options within quoFEM, including global sensitivity analysis, surrogate modeling, multi-fidelity Monte Carlo simulation, and surrogate-aided Bayesian calibration for computationally expensive models through examples to demonstrate opportunities for adapting uncertainty quantification into active research and proposal ideas.
Open source resources for natural hazards research
Social and Health Impacts of Natural Hazards
Modeling and Prediction of Tsunami and Debris Flow Dynamics
Resilience to Flooding and Extreme Rainfall and Storm Surge Impact Evaluation
Advances in Wind Simulation for Risk and Resilience
Computational Methods for Geotechnical Hazards
Machine Learning Applications in Earthquake Engineering
Resilience, Risk, and Mitigation Strategies in Earthquake Engineering
This session introduces the advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) capabilities implemented within SimCenter’s WE-UQ tool to enable computational wind engineering studies. These features include streamlined CFD workflows to assess the wind-induced loads and responses on structures. The session begins by discussing the key steps needed for a successful CFD-based wind load simulation inlight of the recent advances in computational wind engineering. Next, the implemented CFD-based workflow is described in detail emphasizing the newly incorporated features that allow users to create or import building geometries, generate automated unstructured mesh, define boundary conditions, run simulations on HPC resources provided by DesignSafe, and post-process results. Finally, the developed workflow is demonstrated through two examples: the first illustrates creating a digital twin of an existing wind tunnel testing facility and validating it against experimental data; the second example applies the workflow to evaluate cladding and overall loads on a high-rise building.
This session will introduce the high-performance computing (HPC) resources available through DesignSafe, including multi-node clusters, GPU-enabled systems, and research storage capabilities, along with the streamlined process to gain access. Demonstrations will showcase research workflows using software such as OpenSees, ADCIRC, ML tools, and OpenFoam. Participants will learn multiple approaches to job submission, including through the web portal interface, interactive Jupyter notebooks, and command line tools.
Hosts: Krishna Kumar and Scott Brandenberg
This session will highlight datasets that have been collected through NSF support RAPID projects using the NHERI RAPID Facility’s equipment and resources. The hosts will highlight four data sets that may be of particular interest to the research community, including two that focus on wildfires that impacted the wildland urban interface (the Camp and Marshall fires). Each dataset contains a combination 3D point clouds that have been derived from images or obtained with lidar. Several also contain images captured via 3D street view type camera systems. For each data set the hosts will present background material on the projects and natural hazards involved, identify where the datasets can be obtained (DesignSafe), and discuss how the datasets may be used for future research. The session will also highlight powerful open source tools that are available for interrogating point clouds and the maps that DesignSafe has enabled to help visualize the datasets before downloading them. Attendees will come away with an understanding of how to access and use these amazing point-in-time models of communities following natural disasters to further their own research.
Hosts: Jeffrey Berman (University of Washington), Karen Dedinsky (University of Washington), Erzhuo Che (Oregon State University)