Recent Activities

Publications

• • Journal paper titled "Development of earthquake damage functions for tall buildings"  in the special issue on Seismic Damage and Loss Assessment in Buildings of Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics (Sept., 2012). The paper describes a simulation-based methodology for estimating vulnerability functions of tall buildings for earthquakes. The methodology takes into account the effects of epistemic and aleatory uncertainties in random variables, such as ground motions, structural response parameters, loss costs, etc., to quantify the uncertainty in the final loss estimate.

  • Conference paper titled "Uncertainty and Spatial Correlation Models for Earthquake Losses" in 15th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering (15WCEE), Lisbon, Portugal. The paper describes the approach for estimating the parameters for 4-parameter Beta distribution of losses and the parameters for spatial distribution of losses between two sites based on the insurance claims data for Northridge earthquake. The approach described in the paper will be used for simulation-based loss calculations in RMS(one) platform.

Conference

• • Organized a Special Session in 2012 SSA Annual meeting on "Uncertainty in the Estimation of Earthquake Hazard". I organized the session with Dr. Mark Petersen, Chief Scientist, US National Hazard Mapping Project, USGS. The objective of the session is to discuss the issues of  assessing uncertainties of the input parameters for seismic hazard calculations.

Presentations

• • Invited to present in the SSA 2012 special session on "Validation of Strong Ground Motion Simulations for Engineering Applications". I have presented the following based on the recent research on the validation of simulated ground motions based on the similarity/dissimilarity of the response of tall buildings for recorded and simulated ground motions.

Recent News and Articles

• 1. L'Aquila quake: Italy scientists guilty of manslaughter - a bad news for science.

  2. A recent publication by Seth Stein in Nature (2011) titled "Do maps magnify the earthquake hazard?" as well as in Tectonophysics (2012) titled "Why earthquake hazard maps often fail and what to do about it?". There is clear misunderstanding on this issue by the authors and recently Hanks, T.C., Beroza, G.C., and Toda, S. (2012) have responded to this issue in SRL,83(5), 2012.