Transforming Infrastructure, Transforming Lives Building on 200 years Professor Lord Robert Mair, ICE President - November 7 2017 Good evening ladies and gentlemen, colleagues and friends of the Institution. Thank you Tim for your kind words of introduction. It is with the greatest honour that I assume the role of President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and build upon your legacy, and that of our predecessors. Tim s Presidential year focussed on the theme of Engineering a Digital Future. My own presidential year coincides with the Institution s Bicentenary. This anniversary marks the pivotal meeting in 1818 at the Kendal Coffee house in Fleet Street of Henry Robinson Palmer, James Jones and Joshua Field: a meeting that would see the granting of a charter a decade later; and within two centuries the creation of a global institution with a total membership of over 90,000,. It is remarkable that two hundred years ago these three young engineers established the world s first professional engineering body. Their vision was to create an environment in which engineers could share knowledge and learn from each other: the basis of what our Institution does today. Yet, it was when Thomas Telford became the Institution s first President that the ICE truly gained momentum. It fills me both with great humility and great pride, to know that I am taking on a mantle, once worn by this paragon of our profession. He constructed over a thousand miles of roads, a multitude of bridges, and many canals; and he was consulted upon on almost every feat of engineering in Britain, during the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. His most famous project was the Menai suspension bridge. One of Telford s greatest achievements however, was to establish the Institution as a place of learning, and to cement its relevance in public life. He worked closely with Parliament to advise decision makers and to shape opinion, and was a critical figure in the development of infrastructure during the Industrial Revolution. But whilst I do want to celebrate the past, above all I would like my presidency to look to the future, and to build on Tim s legacy of innovation, transformation and advancement. Therefore the theme at the heart of my presidential year will be: Transforming Infrastructure, Transforming Lives Building on 200 years. This is a theme that seeks to celebrate the past, and to catalyse another 200 years of transformational work.
Speaking to you this evening, I would like to explore the idea of the engineer of the past and the engineer of the future: how they differ, and where they remain unchanged. I would then like to make a commitment, on behalf of the ICE, to support the transformation of our profession and of infrastructure itself, thus transforming the lives of all of you listening to my address today: current and future engineers; decision makers and opinion shapers; and indeed everyone in our society who relies on infrastructure in their everyday life. But each of you has your own part to play in transforming the future of this profession: each of you can transform infrastructure, and each of you can transform lives. And I will ask you to join the ICE in its mission to transform the world for another 200 years. However, first let us acknowledge our 200 year old legacy, and look at the engineer of the past. Who was the engineer of the past? What did they build? How did they transform lives? Engineers can be proud to say that ours is a profession with a great history of transforming lives. In the words of our charter, Civil Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in nature to improve society. Ours is a great profession, with a great legacy. A legacy that is seen around the world. A legacy that has shaped the modern landscape, and the modern way of life. Our mark on history is clear to see in so many ways: in the trains that many of you have used today; the roads upon which you have travelled; the taps from which you obtain clean water; and the buildings in which you now sit, whether here in One Great George Street or elsewhere. In the twenty first century, much of this legacy is now taken for granted. In the developed world this infrastructure is now the norm. It no longer shocks and excites in the way it did in the past. But the engineers of the nineteenth century were innovators and revolutionaries, who built a world of steam and steel and were driven by a vision that many of their contemporaries did not share. Our predecessors used their skills and imagination to stand up to the challenges of their time. Whether in the spheres of public health, education, or the economy; they saw infrastructure as a cure to social ills. Their engineering brought sanitation to urban areas; facilitated movement between cities and across borders; stimulated economic growth and opened up international trade. Quality of life was improved immeasurably and choices were suddenly available: people of all walks of life were being given the opportunity to become the masters of their own fate.
The engineer of the past was a revolutionary, and there is a wealth of individuals of this kind who I am honoured to say were members of our Institution. One of our own former Presidents, Joseph Bazalgette, stepped up to the public health challenges of his time, caused by the use of the Thames as an open sewer. Half a mile from where I currently stand was the source of cholera epidemics that plagued the population, killing just over 10,000 people in 1853 alone. These appalling cholera epidemics, combined with the Great Stink from the River Thames, finally mobilised Parliament to act. Bazalgette in his role as Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board created London s sewer network, building many miles of pipes and sewers. These were deliberately much larger than necessary at the time, so as to cater for a possible growth in population. The population did indeed grow. Bazalgette s foresight meant that not only did he virtually eliminate cholera, and decrease the number of typhus epidemics that plagued London, but his system of sewers accommodated this city for 150 years without need for expansion. He transformed lives in a major way. In my own career I have seen the way in which engineers can transform lives. Soon after graduating from Cambridge, I was sent by Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick to Hong Kong in 1973, to work on the design and construction of a major container port. The Hong Kong of the 1970s was an entirely different place to the Hong Kong of today. I came to Hong Kong at a time when the government was considering how to tackle the challenge of congestion on the roads, and when there was no connection between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon. The infrastructure of Hong Kong was simply unable to accommodate a fast-growing economy, a society being rapidly transformed through modernisation. And the same is true for Dubai. Its infrastructure too has changed radically in the past few decades. The single highrise building in the 2 photographs, the Dubai World Trade Centre, now houses the new ICE offices opened 2 weeks ago. Back to Hong Kong. The vision for Hong Kong was for a new metro system. - a system like the Metropolitan Railway, built just over a hundred years earlier in London, that would revolutionise transit in a densely urban environment. Ground investigations started to take place to assess the feasibility of building a metro. I became involved.
Despite it seeming impossible to build tunnels under high rise structures, and through soft ground, Hong Kong eventually built a world-famous Mass Transit Railway, and its landscape, the lives of its citizens, and my own career, were completely transformed. As indeed lives have been transformed by new metro systems in many other densely urban areas Delhi is just one example there are countless others. I was very fortunate to be in Hong Kong at that time. There were many concerns around building tunnels in soft ground. Would the tunnels be stable during construction? What might be the ground movements? Would these adversely affect the buildings?. In order to answer these questions I was seconded from Scott Wilson to Cambridge University to investigate these problems on a Transport and Road Research Laboratory funded research contract. I worked under the supervision of Professor Andrew Schofield, using the then new 10m diameter geotechnical centrifuge at Cambridge. That sparked my lifelong interest in applying the very latest research developments in academia to civil engineering practice. A few years later I became a founder of the Geotechnical Consulting Group (GCG) a specialist group of geotechnical experts from universities that could work with full-time engineers and geologists to solve difficult practical problems. Amongst many other geotechnical breakthroughs, substantial advances were made in the prediction and control of ground settlements caused by tunnelling and deep excavations, and their effects on buildings. The latest academic research was applied to make major new advances to engineering practice something that all engineering academics working in our universities should aim to achieve. One of the many advances was the introduction of the technique of compensation grouting. This is a highly controlled process in which carefully specified volumes of liquid cement grout are injected into the ground from steel tubes in response to measurements - compensating for the ground movements caused at depth by tunnelling, thereby preventing damaging settlement of the building at the ground surface. The steel tubes are usually pre-installed from a vertical shaft. After being tried and proved on a project at Waterloo Station this new technique was put into practice for the Jubilee Line Extension notably the protection of Big Ben. Without compensation grouting, the 40m deep Westminster Station constructed only 34m from Big Ben, together with new station tunnels, would have caused Big Ben to lean very significantly.. A Leaning Tower of Pisa in central London would not have gone down well. [Comment on scaffolding and cladding currently on Big Ben]
Compensation grouting has also been widely used on Crossrail, currently Europe s largest construction project, comprising 21km of new tunnels beneath central London and 8 new sub-surface stations. This is a view of one of those stations Liverpool Street.. At Liverpool Street Station a key innovation by the contractor BBMV was to construct small special tunnels for the compensation grouting. Instead of vertical shafts, these 4m diameter tunnels were specifically for the purpose of installing horizontal grout tubes in the ground beneath the buildings - thereby protecting them from the potential settlement effects of the much larger station tunnels constructed beneath. This was a highly successful innovation. Compensation grouting was also successfully used at other Crossrail stations, such as Bond Street, to protect a large number of buildings. Here you can see many buildings in the blue shaded zones being protected by compensation grouting tubes installed from 5 vertical shafts (the white circles on the slide). This innovative and highly successful technique has now been widely adopted around the world. It enables tunnels to be safely constructed in urban areas without damaging the overlying buildings.. My colleagues and I, like the engineers of the past, had to innovate and to be creative. Our profession has always had to think creatively to address the difficulties presented to it. So, who was the engineer of the past? The engineer of the past was an innovator and a revolutionary. They saw the profession as a means of improving the lives of their contemporaries. They built to last, but often without a real understanding of their creations, or any certainty around their longevity. Our predecessors created robust structures both over ground and underground. They hoped that, like the pyramids of Ancient Egypt and the aqueducts of Rome, these great creations would stand the test of time. These structures were built to transform the world in which they stood. But has our purpose changed? Are there no more challenges left? Does the engineer of the future solely maintain and replicate the structures of the past? The answer is emphatically no. The engineer of the future has a multitude of challenges to step up to. Globally, one in eight people lives in extreme poverty. Nearly 800 million people still suffer from hunger. 60 million children of primary school age are out of school, and around 750 million adults are unable to read and write. 700 million people still use unclean water sources, and over 2 billion are without improved sanitation.
There are massive global improvements to be made in so many areas: from hunger to gender equality, global warming to sanitation. And we as a profession have the tools to tackle these challenges. I have spoken of the trailblazers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I assure you that we and the next generation of civil engineers can transform lives the way they did. For example the ICE s Shaping the World Programme, is focussing on how civil engineering can help take forward the delivery of the UN s Sustainable Development goals, in particular Goal 6, to ensure access to water and sanitation for all. The ICE has provided funding to John Bridgeman, Pro Vice Chancellor at the University of Bradford to further test his design for a fluorescence-base water quality assessment device. This simple-to-use instrument can be used in areas with poor sanitation, and in disaster relief. By helping to detect unsafe water, it will reduce the likelihood of future outbreaks of water-related diseases, such as cholera. These are the types of projects we want to encourage. This is the type of work we need to facilitate.. Global challenges need a global response. So I am delighted that one of the highlights of my Presidential Year and of ICE 200 will be the Global Engineering Congress. In October next year, we will host experts from the American and Canadian Societies of Civil Engineers, as well as the European Council of Civil Engineers and the World Federation of Engineering Organisations who are celebrating their own 50 th birthday. This unprecedented gathering of global engineering leaders will pool knowledge on how we can tackle the UN Sustainable Development Goals and create an agenda and momentum for change. A great example of this is the work of a colleague of mine at Cambridge, Dr Mohammed Elshafie. He is currently working on a collaborative research project, working to address the challenges of the development of sustainable energy in Africa. WindAfrica, is a project seeking to tackle the difficulties of building wind turbines on unsaturated expansive soils. These soils expand significantly when wet, and shrink when dry, which results in very unstable conditions for turbine foundations, particularly for repeated cycles of loading
Working in Sudan, the team will be focussing on understanding the soil through collection of field data, physical modelling and numerical analyses, in order to eventually provide foundation design guidelines for wind turbines in Africa. This type of soil is found right across East Africa, so the implications of this project are huge. It will enable the growth of a sustainable energy market in Africa, where half a billion people lack access to electricity, despite the continent being so rich in renewable energy resources. And it will enable engineers to design foundations simply that are clever, elegant and stand the tests of their environment. For me, the most exciting outcome of the advent of new technology is the opportunity to create smart infrastructure. We are presently in a digital revolution of innovation and transformation. The engineers of the future must now build smart. They should build assets that don t just stand and wait for renovations and maintenance, but tell us what they require: assets that live. Historically we have built without fully understanding our creations. We did not know where exactly they would show strain, or how they would perform in detail both during construction and over their entire lifetime. But now we are beginning to. Through the use of new tools such as fibre optic strain measurement and wireless sensor networks, we can start to build living assets and to truly understand how our infrastructure actually performs. But what are the implications of this technology? And what does it mean to build smart? When one has a car, one does not solely rely on MOT testing to find out its faults. Whilst driving, a light will flicker on to say that there is a fault with the brake or the engine. Perhaps the car is overheating or oil levels are low. These warning signs allow the driver to fix problems before they cause severe damage to the vehicle, or even an accident. Sensors in gas turbine aero engines tell Rolls-Royce engineers exactly how the engines are performing in real time, wherever in the world they are flying. Why shouldn t our infrastructure do the very same, and be equally smart? Innovative wireless sensor technologies, the Internet of Things and data analytics are vital ingredients to the future of our infrastructure. Smart infrastructure can define the future of society. In this era of rapid digital transformation we must exploit the potential of Big Data. We must treat data as a resource and recognise its huge value in improving the design, development and management of our our infrastructure - and of our future smart cities.
People will have different views about what a smart city actually is. But ask society what factors are crucial in making a city smart, and the answers are likely to include: environment, health and wellbeing, culture, recreation, education, employment, energy, transportation and mobility:, and underpinning it all,, its infrastructure (both physical and digital). Our infrastructure is a crucial part of what makes society work. So what is smart infrastructure? For me it is the interaction between the physical and digital, resulting in infrastructure that responds intelligently to changes in its environment; with the ability to tell us how it is doing, and influence and direct its own delivery, use, and maintenance. Creating this is the new challenge for civil engineers in the modern world. We have come to an exciting time in engineering, where our profession has started to use this approach in the projects we build. We have started to use new sensor technologies to collect data: data that can be used to revolutionise the construction process by making it more efficient, reducing costs, and making us truly understand the infrastructure we create. It can also help us manage our ageing infrastructure and secure its longevity. The 2 nd Jindo Bridge in Korea was one of the first bridges in the world to be fully equipped with a wireless smart sensor network. These sensors installed on the bridge deck, on the cables and on the towers enabled a full understanding of the detailed performance of the bridge under traffic loading, and most importantly under high wind loading. Another exciting use of sensor technology is on the very recently completed Queensferry Crossing, alongside the two other bridges across the Forth estuary in Scotland. This great feat of civil engineering is a 2.7km long cable-stayed bridge, supported by just three slender single column towers, carrying a motorway with two general lanes of traffic in either direction. The bridge has been built with technology that provides real-time information on the structure, and monitors its structural health. This includes strain gauges and accelerometers, load cells, temperature sensors, displacement transducers, and automated monitoring and analysis. Engineers therefore have had a real understanding of the performance of this elegant structure during its construction - and importantly this will continue throughout its operating life. But how does this sensor technology transform lives? By giving our structures a voice, they can tell us how to look after them. Much of our infrastructure is vulnerable, and its resilience is vital to our society. We could avoid these resilience problems, by having sensors warn us of any weaknesses.
This particularly applies to our old infrastructure, for example masonry arch bridges. There are 18,000 bridges in the UK constructed of masonry in uncertain condition. There have been 3 instances of partial masonry bridge collapse in 2015 & 2016 alone. By installing sensors on structures such as these we can assess how they are performing, and make great use of the information. For example, we can avoid the annoyance of train delays in the case of cracked masonry railway bridges, by having sensors judge whether speed restrictions are actually necessary. Fibre optics sensors have provided new insights into the behaviour under dynamic loading of the bridge shown in the top left of the slide a Victorian railway bridge in Leeds that is significantly cracked. These sensors have led to a relaxing of speed restrictions on that bridge and considerably improved assessment and management procedures. This is just one example of how sensors can provide answers to infrastructure decision makers. They enable a rational assessment of whether a piece of infrastructure is safe or instead needs to be closed down or repaired. These sensors also inform us as we build new infrastructure around and close to the old: providing the evidence that the old will not be adversely affected by the new. They allow us to find space where none was seemingly available, and to improve the capacity of what already exists, to support an ever growing population. The engineer of the future therefore now has the tools to innovate and transform. I am fortunate to have been a member of the expert panel for a project led by one of my own Presidential Team, Andrew Wolstenholme. When speaking of the benefits of innovation in Civil Engineering, one need look no further than Crossrail. Crossrail is a paragon of smart building. Its engineers are working with academics at the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC), a team I head at Cambridge. The result has been a whole series of innovative applications of fibre optics and wireless sensors on Crossrail, the largest construction project in Europe.
CSIC has used fibre optic sensors both in sprayed concrete tunnel linings in Liverpool Street Station, and to monitor the deformation of a diaphragm walls supporting various Crossrail shafts and deep excavations,. In these projects, sensors have been embedded in concrete to measure strain and temperature changes within the material at key stages in construction. This slide shows CSIC researchers attaching fibre optic cables to a primary sprayed concrete lining, prior to a second layer of concrete being sprayed. The fibre optic cable acts as a continuous strain gauge over its entire length and its very cheap. We now have unprecedented levels of detail on the behaviour of the concrete linings or retaining walls, and their interaction with the ground. This information not only gives us a much greater understanding of the detailed performance of infrastructure, but also gives us a wealth of information on potential savings in future designs. The fibre optics sensors quantified the localised stress concentrations caused by construction of crosspassages. They clearly showed that the extent of additional thicknesses of sprayed concrete for strengthening around cross passages could be reduced. This means less concrete, less excavation, less time, safer construction and of course substantial cost savings. We can now make savings in materials and labour, refine our designs and reduce costs through more accurate modelling. No longer do we need to rely on traditional methods of asset management, which rely heavily on visual observation. Our structures can now tell us how they are performing, how we can improve future designs and when we need to maintain them during their operating life. Each underground station such as this contains many cross-passages. The cost savings indicated by this exercise alone will amount to millions of pounds of savings for future station tunnels such as those on Crossrail 2. Crossrail has also used innovative approaches to construction methods. At Tottenham Court Road the platforms were built on site using conventional insitu concrete technology, ie casting concrete on site. Whereas at Liverpool Street Station the platforms were built using Offsite Manufacture, in which key concrete components were cast in Laing O Rourke s factory in the Midlands and assembled on site. Comparisons show 57 employees requiring 67,000 hours at Tottenham Court Road, versus a huge increase in productivity at Liverpool Street: 34 employees in total completing the work within 27,000 hours. Offsite manufacture will transform the way we construct infrastructure. It is not just London s transport system that has stepped into the age of innovation. London s sewage network has also started a new chapter in its design life. Whilst Bazalgette s innovation and foresight
created a system that stood the test of time for 150 years, by now the population of London has grown to around eight million, and the sewers have finally reached capacity. The response to this new challenge is the Thames Tideway Project, which will work alongside the existing Victorian system. An 8m diameter tunnel, 25km long, will soon be constructed beneath the river bed all along the line of the River Thames. This will be connected to a large number of new very deep shafts. The Thames Tideway project is also making use of the results of smart sensor technology. Fibre optics sensors were installed by CSIC in the 70m deep, 30m diameter shaft at the Abbey Mills site, one of the deepest shafts ever built in soft ground conditions. These have provided completely new insights into the performance of the shaft, particularly in relation to the forces induced in it by the ground pressures. This will lead to future designs being refined, with very significant cost savings. Fibre optic sensors were also installed by CSIC in the diaphragm walls for the Crossrail Limmo Shaft. The fibre optic cables are easily attached to the reinforcement cages both in the longitudinal and transverse directions. These too provided a completely new understanding of the behaviour of deep circular shafts constructed with diaphragm walls enabling future designs to be improved, saving time, materials and money. It is very straightforward to attach fibre optic cables like this to concrete reinforcement for any type of new construction. And also to existing infrastructure, such as the masonry railway bridge I described earlier. CSIC has now done this for a wide range of civil engineering infrastructure: bored piles, earthworks, tunnels, buildings, bridges and sewers the technique has been successfully tried, tested and perfected on over 100 different sites, both in the UK and overseas, including the tunnels for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. These are all examples of long term thinking; of optimal efficiency; of building assets that teach us more about our profession, both by giving us real data on our infrastructure - and by encouraging collaboration between industry and academia: a recipe for innovation. An excellent illustration of industry-academia collaboration is the recent creation of UKCRIC the UK Collaboration for Research on Infrastructure and Cities Funded by Government and industry, and strongly supported by the ICE, this is a new world-class national infrastructure research capability, initially involving 14 UK universities. It will connect many communities of researchers and provide a multi-disciplinary knowledge base. This will play a vital role in meeting the infrastructure needs of the UK, particularly our
cities. There is huge potential for improving our understanding and investment in infrastructure, both old and new, and this important research programme promises to be of great benefit to society. However, as I have said, the role of the engineer of the future is not just producing more efficient infrastructure. The engineer of the future needs to identify the broader challenges of the twentyfirst century, and to become part of their solution. Our predecessors saw poverty, high mortality rates, stagnant economies and growing populations, and proposed ways in which infrastructure could transform lives. The engineers of the future must do the same. The global challenges I identified earlier on are not small, and nor are they so distant from where I stand in Westminster. Every person across the globe deserves a home that is safe; clean water; sanitation; clean air; electricity, the means to travel; and choice. Choice to use the motorway or the train. Choice to work locally or afar. Choice to have access to education, healthcare and opportunities. This is what the engineer of the future must work to achieve for all our society. I said to you that I will make a commitment to you all on behalf of the ICE, to support this transformational agenda. In order to deliver the living assets of which I have spoken, we need agile engineers: engineers who are plugged into the very latest technical developments; who collaborate with colleagues across disciplines; and are responsive to the changing needs of the public. We need to be new and fast, not old and slow. The Institution of Civil Engineers intends to do all it can to support the development of the engineer of the future. The Institution has always been a learned society. We have always sought to shape the agenda, to influence government and modernise engineering practice. I spoke earlier about Palmer, Jones and Field back in 1818, and of their hope for an organisation in which engineers could share knowledge, in order to learn and innovate. But the Institution they formed in the Kendal Coffee House was one that befitted a smaller membership; not a membership that now extends across the globe and covers over 90,000 individuals. We therefore need to rethink what it means to be a learned society. The ICE is modernising its fundamental purpose. We still share knowledge, still promote an environment in which engineers from all backgrounds learn from one another; it is the means by which we do so that has evolved. In 1818, a handful of engineers could meet in person, present their projects to each other, and write up reports detailing the proceedings.
Now we are a global institution with approaching 100,000 members. We have just opened new offices in the UAE and this year we will have our first staff on the ground in Malaysia. To cope with this growth the coffee shop has had to go digital. We use social media and webinars to replicate the experience of our founders. Our 60 minute recorded lectures on the web get an average 2000 plays per month, and our Lunch and Learn events often attract over 100 attendees, and have been watched online thousands of times from all around the world. So today, coffee shop meetings cover a huge range of subjects and reach hundreds of individuals at any one time. ICE Knowledge Exchange will build on the online content we are already producing. We will create a structured Whole Life Learning package, so that each one of our members can benefit from exchanging knowledge with their peers, throughout their whole career, and from every corner of the globe. Alongside this, ICE Thought Leadership will build on Telford s legacy of active involvement in the great issues of the day. Telford worked closely with Parliament, engaging in debates, helping shape opinion, and advising government on infrastructure. This practice continues today. Many members of our Institution, myself included, have been active in the political sphere. Whether like me, they have sat in the House of Lords or on other influential bodies, or have been brought in in an advisory capacity to provide expertise on particular issues or projects; ours is a profession whose influence is far reaching on all matters related to the built environment. ICE Thought Leadership will promote this type of engagement, and will focus on helping members and all the people we work with and serve to understand the long term challenges facing global infrastructure; and more importantly, stimulate thinking and action on what can be done about them. It will exploit the huge convening power of ICE to bring together coalitions of individuals and organisations. We will build on recent projects that have done just that: in 2016 the National Needs Assessment that identified the UK s infrastructure needs on the 30 year horizon; and this year s Project 13 which has been tackling the poor productivity performance bedevilling construction for so many years. On a more sobering note, we are also using that convening power in the light of the Grenfell Tower disaster. It is vital that we reflect on any future steps needed to reduce the risk of potential failures of the infrastructure for which we are responsible. Yesterday Peter Hansford, one of my predecessors as President, delivered his interim report on these issues. We have acted quickly and established 3 cross-sector task groups to take forward Peter s recommendations. Our influence as a profession is substantial. The Construction Leadership Council for example, brings together business leaders from across the sector, with the goal of transforming the industry. Under Andrew Wolstenholme s leadership the CLC works to identify and promote means of reducing cost, project time, carbon emissions and the trade gap in the industry. It is the bridge between construction and government.
Leadership Councils in other sectors have brought about big changes, and I believe that the CLC will be no different. With the very strong support of the ICE it is pioneering a Sector Deal as part of the Government s Industrial Strategy, outlining how Britain will remain at the forefront of global construction over the coming years, boosting economic growth and benefitting the country as a whole. Underpinning the proposed Sector Deal will be three key strategic themes that will transform our industry: firstly DIGITAL - delivering better, more certain outcomes using digital technologies, a theme highlighted by Tim Broyd in his Presidential Address. Key to this is the Government s recently announced Digital Built Britain programme its primary focus being Building Information Modelling at increasing levels of sophistication. secondly MANUFACTURING - improving productivity, quality and safety by increasing the use of offsite manufacturing. I showed earlier a comparison of two stations being built for Crossrail, in which offsite manufacture resulted in hugely increased productivity. and thirdly PERFORMANCE - optimising through-life performance through smart infrastructure assets involving sensor technologies and data analytics the theme I have been emphasising. This will lead to improved and more economic designs. It will also revolutionise Asset Management data generated by sensors will enable continuous monitoring of an asset throughout its life, providing information for more rational maintenance and repair strategies. This will substantially reduce infrastructure operating costs. We will also be a much better position to prioritise the nation s infrastructure requirements. We want to encourage and inspire people to think in this way, and to be part of far-reaching transformational work. ICE Thought Leadership will underpin our effort to shape the agenda; take a pivotal role in the profession; and play a full part in public life. How else can the ICE transform infrastructure? A vital task is to inspire the next generation of engineers. Engineers who think in new ways, who have new approaches; like the three young men who met in the coffee house two centuries ago. This can take many forms.the exhibitions we have set up in our Infrastructure Learning Hub in the old library here at One Great George Street have drawn in thousands of visitors, of whom a large proportion have been children. The Bridge Engineering exhibition for example, which included a magnificent 31m LEGO bridge, received 13,000 visitors, with a further 34,000 people visiting the exhibition online. Around a quarter of these visitors were children. They were inspired and enthused by the interactive nature of the exhibition, which got them to put their newly acquired knowledge into practice by building their own LEGO bridges. The bridge is now on display in Liverpool, taking our message to thousands more people.
But we want to do even more. ICE 200, the celebration of our bicentenary, is the perfect platform for inspiring the next generation. We want to reach out to individuals outside of the profession and to show them how civil engineers can, and have, transformed lives. We will hold events across the United Kingdom, and the world, that will celebrate and educate and inspire. A few weeks ago, for our inaugural EngineeringLate event, this Institution opened its doors in the evening to over 500 members of the public, showing them the excitement of the world of civil engineering there were queues for the talks, exhibitions and debates that were held. Here in this building, the Infrastructure Learning Hub will soon be hosting a special exhibition Invisible Superheroes that will showcase the huge range and diversity of roles carried out by civil engineers and of course explain how we transform lives. We all know that engineering is creative and exciting. The satisfaction of standing back and looking at what one has helped to create is indescribable. Civil engineering is a fascinating and rewarding career. It has and will continue to benefit from developments in science, technology, media, and the arts; but we have to make sure that young people know that their skills, whatever they may be, have a place in our profession. We must convince people that civil engineering is fast, modern and creative, embracing the very latest technologies, involving many disciplines. The exhibition and the whole of the ICE 200 programme will do just that. Returning to my own work, at CISC in Cambridge I have personally witnessed the incredible developments that have been made by inter-disciplinary approaches, and through the innovations of the next generation. A good example is one of our PhD students at Cambridge, Heba Bevan. She joined us from ARM the hugely successful semi-conductor and software design company, headquartered in Cambridge. She designed and developed a very neat little wireless sensor called the Utterberry, which can measure movement, temperature, humidity and other parameters. She has already won a large number of innovation awards. The Utterberry only requires very small amounts of power, and soon such sensors might require no power at all; since with the advent of energy harvesting, the power for the sensors will be generated by vibrations from traffic, and not by batteries. This new product, developed only in the past couple of years, has already been deployed extensively on Crossrail and on other projects. It can be easily deployed on existing infrastructure. It is simple but powerful, easy to install. It represents the exciting future that new technology can offer civil engineers. Such sensors will transform our understanding of infrastructure, both under construction and throughout its life.. New technologies must be part of the future for civil engineering, examples being robotics, drones, tidal energy, new materials and 3D printing, mixed reality, artificial intelligence and machine learning - and of
course sensors and the Internet of Things. There are many other new advances. Autonomous vehicles are likely to be a reality in the foreseeable future. Hyperloop might also be a reality. Civil Engineering is a profession that is simultaneously creative, exciting, cerebral and practical. Students with a range of skills from a wide range of backgrounds should naturally be drawn to it, especially with these exciting new technologies. We need to show them just how diverse the world of Civil Engineering is and embrace all the latest advances in technology. And so, in finishing, I would like to stress that the Institution makes its commitment to you all, to motivate a new generation of engineers; engineers who can draw on new technologies and new methods; engineers who want to face up to the challenges of society, engineers who challenge the status quo, engineers who want to make a difference to our planet. To help me motivate that new generation I have appointed 8 young Future Leaders, who throughout my Presidential year will work with me. These are the generation that will shape our profession in the coming years. But what role can all of you play in transforming infrastructure and transforming lives? We can no longer just build infrastructure without knowing more about its long term performance, and its ability to be smart and modern. We need to be agile and create living assets; we need to be new and fast. Everyone in this room, and across the globe can make a contribution. We all need to reject the old and slow, and embrace the new and fast. I therefore call upon all of you to put transformation at the heart of what you do. If you are a designer, think about how you will routinely embed sensors into the projects you are designing to provide the data we will need to streamline construction, understand performance and operate assets over a multi-decade lifespan. If you are a contractor, embrace the new technologies on site - a world of robotics, drones, off-site manufacture, sensors and data analytics will deliver much greater value to society. If you are in Government or with a client, act now to free up the supply chain to innovate and take risks. Demand innovation and smart assets equipped with sensors, and embed this into your procurement practices. Change your procurement practices to reflect these innovations. If you are an academic, reach out beyond the university and the laboratory, and work with industry to ensure we all benefit from research, new technologies, and the latest thinking. And all of you engineers or otherwise I ask this of you: demand more, be creative, be innovative.
During our bi-centennial in 2018, which is also the Year of Engineering, we will transform ideas about engineering held inside and outside the profession. I hope we will inspire all of you to play your part in the transformation of infrastructure and the transformation of lives. I said at the start of this address that I want to celebrate the past, and simultaneously look to the future during my Presidential year. But my hopes for the future of engineering can only materialise if all of you challenge the status quo; demand more from infrastructure; embrace the very latest technologies; challenge any perceived limitations; and challenge the social ills that you see around you. Our Institution was set up 200 years ago by three young engineers, with grand ambitions. I want that precedent to continue. I want the world of infrastructure to be inspired and transformed by young minds, influenced by different cultures, different disciplines, and different technologies. I see a great and vibrant future for our profession. I see a great and vibrant future for infrastructure and for the lives of every person on this planet, regardless of who they are or where they were born. But this future requires us to transform ourselves; how we think and how we act. Above all we need to be ambitious and bold. There are huge science and technology developments to exploit. We have 200 years of innovation behind us, innovation that came from fearlessness. And we must be fearless once more. Ladies and gentleman, I close with these words: you cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.