SYNOPSIS   

This seminar will present probability and reliability methods across the broad spectrum of civil, structural, and geotechnical engineering in two sessions in the morning. The afternoon sessions will focus on application examples, plus guided hands-on for deeper appreciation and understanding.

It will be shown that system reliability, importance sampling, and Monte Carlo simulations can be done as lucid extensions of the first-order reliability method (FORM, which includes the Hasofer-Lind index as a special case).

The aim of this seminar is to overcome conceptual and implementation hurdles in probability and reliability methods faced by engineers, instructors, and research students.

Instead of lengthy mathematics in the traditional approach, the same solutions are obtained much more quickly, clearly, and efficiently by automatic cell-based constrained optimization in the ubiquitous Excel platform.

The seminar will focus on insights, alternative perspectives and comparisons with other methods. The valuable complementary role of reliability methods to the Eurocodes and LRFD will be discussed.


BIODATA OF SPEAKER

Dr. Low Bak Kong earned a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and a BS and an MS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has taught at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) for 35 years and is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

He is a registered professional engineer of Malaysia, and has been listed among the world’s top 2% scientists (both Career and Single Year categories) in the annual lists compiled by Stanford University.

In 2019, Dr. Low received the prestigious Thomas A. Middlebrooks Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Dr. Bak Kong LOW is the author of a 2021 book titled Reliability-Based Design in Soil and Rock Engineering and a 2026 book titled Practical Probability and Reliability Methods for Civil and Environmental Engineering, both published by the CRC Press of the Taylor and Francis group.

Dr. Low is a senior professor at the Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) main campus of Kampar, Malaysia.