Engineering innovation has created incredible technology and found new ways to use current technology to overcome engineering challenges. 

LiDAR is an example of one of these revolutionary tools and today we hear from an art historian turned civil engineer who is using it to scan our cities. We hear about their creation of the world's densest urban aerial laser scanning dataset, which was conducted using a large slice of the center of Dublin City, and the challenges they’ve overcome in transforming how we understand, plan, and protect our cities.

Our guest is a pioneering force in urban data science and has authored over 160 peer reviewed publications, been awarded four patents and worked as a professor in UCD Dublin. She is Professor at New York University's Center for Urban science and Progress, Dr. Debra Laefer. 

GUEST DETAILS
With degrees from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (MS, Ph.D.), NYU (MEng), and Columbia University (BS, BA), Prof. Debra Laefer has a wide-ranging background spanning from geotechnical and structural engineering to art history and historic preservation. 

In her decade and a half as a faculty member in both the US and Europe, Prof. Laefer has served as the principal investigator for grants from a wide range of sponsors including the National Science Foundation, the US Federal Highway Administration, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Science Foundation Ireland, and the European Research Council (including a €1.5 million single investigator award from the flagship ERC program for which she is the only civil engineer to have been funded in Ireland in the program’s 11 year history).

Prof. Laefer has authored over 160 peer-reviewed publications, been awarded 4 patents, and has supervised 15 doctoral and 20 Masters theses. Among many honors from IEEE, ISPRS, and other professional societies, the most notable is perhaps the 2016 commissioning and hanging of her portrait by the Royal Irish Academy as one of eight researchers selected for the Women on Walls project to celebrate Irish women in science and engineering. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/debra-f-laefer-09510a11/ 

MORE INFORMATION

Video mentioned in the podast of High Density Laser Scanning (LiDAR) Data Dublin is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEi2Wo7Bcuk

Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/   

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We didn't devise a sensor, we didn't even improve the sensor, but we took a fundamentally engineering approach to it. We took this more systematic approach of; let's reverse engineer the process, figure out what we want to get and figure out how to use the sensor to obtain that data. - Dr. Debra Laefer 

This technique has been used in fields as far from civil engineering as breast cancer research. So that not only has it been transferred to other LIDAR applications, but people have used it for other remote sensing and medical imaging datasets. - Dr. Debra Laefer 

It's good to make mistakes, and it's good to have senior engineers check them. - Dr. Debra Laefer

As crazy as your idea may seem, a lot of the time the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve, so don't give up on them. - Dr. Debra Laefer 

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