Habib Fathi, a former PhD student of Laing O'Rourke Lecturer Dr Ioannis Brilakis, was awarded the Charles Eastman Top PhD Paper Award at the 2014 Computing in Civil and Building Engineering conference. According to the CIB W078, “This award, presented at each of W078's annual international conferences, recognizes the importance of developing top young researchers in the core field of W078, the application of integrated IT throughout the lifecycle of the design, construction and occupancy of buildings and related facilities.”
"The award is named after a seminal researcher in this field who has, over his illustrious career, supervised and mentored many of the top researchers found across the world. Chuck Eastman's involvement in W078 dates back to 1988 with a keynote presentation and since then he and his students have been strong supporters of the annual series.”
The paper is entitled “A Scale, Rotation, and Affine Invariant Line Detection and Matching Algorithm for 3D Reconstruction of Infrastructure”. It sets the foundations for automated reconstruction of civil infrastructure and describes perhaps the most definitive and robust method for detecting 3D lines in civil infrastructure scenes. The award was announced during a ceremony held on June 25th.