Dr. Omar Sediek will speak as part of the Disaster Resilience Analytics Center (DRAC) seminar series from noon to 1 p.m. Thursday, June 22 via Zoom.
His talk will discuss the necessity of distributed computing for conducting cross-disciplinary research where field-specific computational models (simulators) are available, but have not been designed to work together. An example of this is natural hazards research. Simulators abound in the disparate fields that fall under this area (e.g. social science, engineering, economics and health), but little progress has been made to integrate the simulators to study overarching and cross-disciplinary disaster scenarios. The reason for slow penetration of this technology is the high barrier to entry, which requires extensive knowledge of computer science and programming. The talk will focus on a platform named Simple Run Time Infrastructure (SRTI) that address the issues mentioned above. Designed to provide a low barrier to use, SRTI v2 is developed for users with limited programming experience and designed to simplify and streamline a user’s effort to compose a distributed simulation and handle time management.
Dr. Sediek is a bridge engineer at Alfred Benesch & Company. He received his joint Ph.D. in civil engineering and scientific computing from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with specialization in seismic resilience of communities. He received his bachelor’s and master’s from Cairo University in Egypt. His research interests span from the stability of steel members to community resilience against natural hazards and the use of artificial intelligence in structural engineering.