On the morning of December 15, 2016, Prof. Billie F. Spencer from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) shared his cutting-edge research in structural health monitoring with the faculty members of the School of Civil Engineering and Transportation.

Professor Spencer firstly introduced the long history of UIUC and school's academic achievements in different fields. He also introduced the civil engineering program and its academic achievement of UIUC.

Prof. Spencer gave a lecture on Civil Structural Health Monitoring: From Research to Engineering. The report covers the working principle and development of wireless intelligent sensor and sensor network in civil structure health monitoring.
Prof. Spencer introduced the working principle, technical advantages and application of the first-generation wireless intelligent sensor Imote2 developed by his team for the monitoring of Jindo bridge in Korea. In recent years, through the integration of more cutting-edge hardware and software, Professor Spencer team has developed a second generation of wireless smart sensor Xnode. The sensor has high sensitivity, integrated advanced data processing module, multi-channel, scalable and other advantages. Professor Spencer finally introduced the application of the sensor Xnode in a US railway bridge survey. During the questioning session, the faculty members and Prof. Spencer communicated on different academic issues.

After the symposium, Prof. Spencer and Prof. Su Cheng exchanged academic experiences and visited the structural seismic laboratory, structure wind tunnel laboratory and structural fire resistance laboratory of the State Key Laboratory of Subtropical. Prof. Spencer gave a high appraisal of the construction and operation of the laboratory. (Photo/The Research Team of Theory of Structure Disaster Prevention and Reduction and Health Monitoring; Editor/ Mu Heqing, Zheng Z)

Billie F. Spencer introduction：
B.F. Spencer, Jr. received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985. He worked on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame for 17 years before returning to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he currently holds the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering and is the Director of the Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory. His research has been primarily in the areas of smart structures, stochastic fatigue, stochastic computational mechanics, and natural hazard mitigation.  He is a Fellow of ASCE, a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the North American Editor in Chief of Smart Structures and Systems, and the past president of the Asia-Pacific Network of Centers for Research in Smart Structures Technology.