PhD focusing on AI-equipped structural health monitoring wins Harold O. Wolf Achievement Award
Seyedomid Sajedi (left) stands with his advisor, assistant professor Xiao Liang (right) after the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences commencement ceremony.
By Peter Murphy
Published June 7, 2022
Graduating PhD Seyedomid Sajedi earns the Harold O. Wolf Achievement Award, as he finishes his degree and looks toward deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) models for projects beyond academia.
The award is given by Mary Wolf to honor and pay tribute to her late husband Harold O. Wolf, BA geology 1960, and recognizes “high achieving students pursuing an engineering degree who distinguish themselves in academic coursework and extracurricular activities,” according to UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Sajedi’s research focuses on modern data-driven structural health monitoring. He processes raw vibration and image data into information about structural damage. AI is core to Sajedi’s research and makes the automations more powerful and reliable.
Since 2019, Sajedi’s work and research presentations have earned several accolades. Sajedi earned first place in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) structural control and health monitoring committee’s 2020 student paper competition. He won the 2020 department of civil, structural and environmental engineering’s student poster competition, and won the O.H. Ammann fellowship from ASCE, the Mark Diamond Research Fund from UB, and multinational technology company NVIDIA’s data science GPU grant.
According to Sajedi’s advisor, assistant professor in civil, structural and environmental engineering Xiao Liang, his research and findings are significant.
“Omid has managed to solve several challenging problems in his field of research, such as developing data-driven frameworks for reliable and optimal damage diagnosis frameworks,” Liang says. “For the first time in his field, his research promotes awareness of the risks of using AI and the importance of quantifying the deep learning model uncertainty for structural safety assessments.”
Sajedi graduated with his PhD from the University at Buffalo in May, and he looks forward to continuing his research in a different setting.
“During my PhD program, I tried to present our studies on AI-equipped structural health monitoring in different venues and highlight our institution,” Sajedi says. “The goal of my research was to study some obstacles to the industrial integration of AI in structural engineering. I believe I can have a greater impact on achieving this goal if I have direct interaction with the industry.”
According to Liang, Sajedi could make a major impact on the structural engineering industry.
“I believe, based on what Omid accomplished at UB, he will develop AI solutions for practicing engineers, and industry will benefit a lot from such integration.”