The SimCenter Developer Team engages post-doctoral research scientists and assistants to enhance and develop SimCenter software tools. In this article we feature Dr. Kuanshi Zhong, Dr. Stevan Gavrilovic, and Dr. Yunhui Guo. To contact our developer team or ask questions about SimCenter tools please contact us at the SimCenter User Forum.
Kuanshi Zhong, Postdoctoral Scholar, Software Developer
Dr. Zhong joins the SimCenter software development team to advance hazard simulation capabilities at the regional level and performance-based engineering assessments. In his doctoral research, Dr. Zhong developed numerical models to simulate low-cycle fatigue and fracture in reinforcing bars, which he applied to evaluate seismic design requirements for high-strength steel bars and the influence of earthquake duration. He has also developed and implemented a methodology to adapt incremental dynamic analysis to account for site-specific hazard characteristics in seismic performance assessment. He is currently developing tools for simulating intensity measures at the regional level for earthquakes and hurricanes. Hell also work on the development, implementation, and documentation of software and models for computational simulation to better assess the damaging effects of earthquakes and hurricanes on buildings and civil infrastructures.
Dr. Zhong reflects that my work at the SimCenteris of great importance to me because it broadens my knowledge about regional risk assessment and management of natural hazards, and it develops my communication and collaboration skills.
Kuanshi Zhong received his Ph.D. from the Stanford University, Department of Civil Engineering. He was a graduate research assistant at the John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, where he worked on the following research projects.
Stevan Gavrilovic, Postdoctoral Scholar, Software Developer
Dr. Gavrilovic joins the SimCenter software development team to work on a front end graphical user interface for rWHALE which is used to simulate the performance of an urban region subjected to natural hazards. He is also involved in the development of OpenSRA, a seismic risk assessment tool for natural gas infrastructure. OpenSRA is a product of a PEER-coordinated research project.
Dr. Gavrilovic notes that this work is important because it can be used by stakeholders for disaster planning and response purposes. Stakeholders can simulate losses within a region, considering a given hazard, and plan accordingly. In addition, it can be used for disaster response, wherein damage can be estimated across a region following a hazard. This allows stakeholders to prioritize and allocate resources to parts of a region with higher levels of damage.
Stevan Gavrilovic received his Ph.D. and Master of Applied Science in Civil Engineering from University of British Columbia, and Bachelor of Engineering, with Distinction, in Civil Engineering, from British Columbia Institute of Technology. His research interests include building sustainability and life-cycle analysis, object-oriented programming and software development, non-linear finite element analysis and building information modeling, structural and earthquake engineering, and reliability-based design optimization and machine learning.
Yunhui Guo, Postdoctoral Scholar, Software Developer
Dr. Guo is working on AI software development with SimCenter domain expert Professor Stella Yu at UC Berkeley. Dr. Guo is developing computer vision and machine learning algorithms that infer large-scale building information from publicly available images and associated records.
Professor Yu states that such AI algorithms will result in more realistic modeling of building structures and simulates the impact of natural hazards more accurately at a large regional scale.
Yunhui Guo received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego. His research interests include efficient machine learning and deep learning with a focus on transfer learning, multi-task learning, few-shot learning, and lifelong learning models. His work experiences include research internships at Qualcomm AI Research, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and Intel Corporation. He has also published numerous papers for technical conferences on machine learning.
