About

Hello! My name is Pingbo Tang. Tang is one of the greatest dynasty in Chinese history, Ping means calm, gentle, flat, and mild in Chinese, and Bo means wavy and dynamic in Chinese. Of course, I am made in China. In 2005, after I finished my master thesis about Bridge CAD at Tongji University, China, P.R., I became a PhD student of Professor Burcu Akinci's MOSAIC group (Management of mOdel-based Sensor-driven Advanced Infrastructure and Construction Systems) at Carnegie Mellon University. In August 2009, I got my PhD degree from Carnegie Mellon with my dissertation titled "Extraction of Surveying Goals from Point Clouds Obtained from Laser Scanners to Support Bridge Inspection". After that, I joined the Mapping and GIS Lab at Ohio State University as a Post Doc Researcher, and was responsible of managing multiple research projects at OSU, most of these projects are related to computer vision based robot localization and spatial data management for interplanetary exploration. I left the Mapping and GIS lab in August 2010, and joined the faculty of the Department of Civil and Construction Engineering at Western Michigan University as a tenure track assistant professor. I joined the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University in July, 2012.

Basically I am interested in Construction Management, Facility Management, Bridge CAD/CAE (Computer-Aided-Design/Computer-Aided-Engineering) and Bridge Management. What I am trying to do is to apply various information and communication technologies (ICT), such as remote sensing, computer vision, knowledge-based systems, product and process modeling to improve people's situation awareness of the condition of construction sites, operational buildings, and infrastructure systems, hence they can make objective and rational decisions about the management of construction, facility and infrastructure. So far, my PhD work can still represent my general research area, this poster is a good overview of it. For a more casual description about my PhD work, please visit here.

As an engineer, an educator, and a researcher, I am always happy to share my expertise with people from both academia and industry. I am open to any ideas about possible collaborations from practitioners, researchers, and of course, prospective students. It is simply an internal desire of me to enable more intelligent infrastructure systems and construction sites, and make engineer's life easier. For prospective students and potential collaborators, I have prepared several pages explaining my long-term academic goals and why I believe that I will become a successful educator, a world-class researcher, and an excellent collaborator of people working on real world construction and infrastructure management projects. I am pursuing my academic dream, and desire to share that dream with you.