HKUST Civil Engineering Researcher Wins Best Oral Presentation at RCAE 2025

_{Dr. Sudao He from the Structural Sensing and Mechanics (SSM) Lab (under the supervision of Prof. Shenghan Zhang) of HKUST’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has received a Best Oral Presentation award from the 8th International Conference on Robotics, Control and Automation Engineering (RCAE 2025).}

_{The award recognizes not only Dr. He’s excellent presentation but also the latest work of Prof. Zhang’s team: “Trustworthy fault diagnosis for civil structural systems using heterogeneous measurements”, a study that explores the use of crack patterns for post-earthquake damage assessment, and demonstrates a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous, multimodal information while assessing the confidence of each modality. In this work, the researchers further show how deep learning models can be enhanced with interpretable inference and quantified prediction uncertainty, which allows for more reliable assessments.}

_{The RCAE, organized by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, is a premier forum for presenting and discussing the latest advances in intelligent and autonomous systems. The conference promotes the development of new technologies and methods in robot perception, planning and control, intelligent and autonomous systems, control and optimization, and machine learning for robotics. The HKUST team’s work showcases a robust autonomous assessment technique for post-earthquake evaluation, which has garnered very strong recognition from peers and experts alike.}