About APESS

Asia-Pacific-Euro Summer School on Smart Structures Technology (APESS)

Advanced sensor technology improves the accuracy of measurements and provide more opportunity for more detail structural evaluation. Their application in the modern world is increasingly widespread. Structures instrumented with sensors can communicate their current condition to a data acquisition system in the form of accelerations, displacements, strains, etc., depending on the sensor type. This information can be used in real-time to control and evaluate structure performance during severe earthquake or wind loads or assess the health of a structure after such events. In the long term, sensors can be used to evaluate structure degradation and to plan maintenance or retrofit works. Instrumentation of full scale structures is a daunting task involving a push for improved technology and understanding in areas of structural dynamics, control systems, circuit technology, wireless technology, and informatics, to name a few. In summary, smart structure technologies offer new opportunities and challenges to the way civil infrastructure systems are monitored, controlled, and maintained.

Conventional civil engineering curriculum only exposes students to the range of the contributing disciplines to smart structures technology in a limited fashion. The APESS program aims at bridging the gap that divides these disciplines through a student oriented international summer program. Graduate students and young researchers each from many different countries will get together for three weeks of focused activities related to smart structures technology. The curriculum will be oriented to address any gaps in education which are necessary for the advancement of the field.

The 2024 APESS will be the latest edition of the summer school, with the first edition held in 2008 in KAIST, South Korea, and the last edition held in 2017 in Yokohama National University, Japan. Other previous hosts of the APESS include the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) USA, University of Tokyo, Japan, Tongji University, China, Indian Institute of Science, India, and the National Taiwan University and ENCREE, Taiwan.