Balili presents at 37th IABSE Symposium - Madrid

Engr. Alden Paul Balili infront of his poster

Engr. Alden Paul D. Balili, Asst. Professor in Civil Engineering attended the 37th International Association of Bridge and Structural Engineers (IABSE) Symposium held in Madrid, Spain last September 3-5, 2014.

The Symposium with the theme of “Engineering Progress for Nature and People” was attended by participants, majority of them from Europe and the rest coming from North America and East Asia. The topics discussed in the event generally revolved around innovative design concepts and sustainable infrastructure.

Balili presented his paper, “Development of Structural Engineering and Educational Application Using Gamesalad” in the poster session for the afternoon of September 4, 2014. In this paper, Balili presented applications he developed on truss analysis, foundation design and engineering mechanics. This applications were designed to run in Android tablets.

       Keynote lectures were also presented. Dong Xu from China discussed the challenges facing bridge engineers in China. What is worth noting is his proposals in the control of cracking in PC Box girder bridges. He presented a novel way of controlling shear cracking by the utilization of horizontal bars. Another keynote paper by Dan Frangopol discusses optimizing the maintenance efforts of the US government using Life-cycle principles. This paper is very relevant to the Philippines, since we also have problems with maintaining our infrastructure. A paper relevant to teaching practices was presented by Maria E. Garlock entitled “Creative Teaching for Educating Creative Structural Engineers”. The points she emphasized can be summarized as follows: · Teach with real examples – Use actual structures in the teaching in mechanics (Ex: Iconic buildings and bridge),  Don’t remove the rigor – Still teach the hard methods in mechanics and Don’t forget to play.

Alden Balili with wife Lorena. Jose Adajar (rightmost) was a former DLSU CE part -time faculty. Chep Uytiepo (2nd from right, a Filipino) is the Acting Director of IABSE Secretariat.