NEWS ON RECENT CONFERENCE
SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PERFORMANCE-
BASED DESIGN IN EARTHQUAKE GEOTECHNICAL ENGINEERING
This conference was held in Taormina, on the 28th, 29th and 30th of May 2012, in a fantastic monastery environment of the San Domenico Hotel in Taormina of Sicily, Italy (Photos 1, 2 and 3). This conference was organized by Prof. Michele Maugeri under the auspices of ISSMGE, TC203 on Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering and Associated Problems (Prof. Kyriaziz Pitilakis as the chairman), and AGI (Italian Geotechnical Association).
Following the footsteps of the most successful PBD Conference held in Tokyo in 2009 and the 5th International Conference in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering held in Santiago (Chile) in 2010, the Taormina PBD 2012 Conference offered an ideal forum to present and discuss the most recent advances and progresses in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering and in particular in the Performance Based Design. The Conference was organized around 5 State-of-the-Art, 21 Keynote Lectures, 4 Invited Lectures given by distinguished international experts and 100 presented papers on different topics over 141 selected ones; 3 Special Sessions were devoted to the mega Tohoku 2011 earthquake in Japan, and the two large devastating earthquakes in New Zealand (2011) and the Abruzzo 2009 earthquake in Italy (totally 14 speakers). Furthermore, one Workshop was organized on RRTT, Round Robin Tunnel Centrifuge Test (totally 6 speakers) and one Symposium in honour of Prof. S. Prakash (totally 5 speakers). Finally, a replication of Rankine Lecture was delivered by Prof. Malcom Bolton (University of Cambridge, UK) on the Performance-Based Design on Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering.
Totally, there were 155 speakers and 365 authors came from 29 countries. As concerns the SOA and the Keynote Lectures, the 26 speakers were: 7 from USA, 6 from Japan, 6 from Italy, 4 from Greece, 1 from Turkey, France and Chile.
The number of participants of the conference was in total 235, coming from 32 countries. Apart from the hosting country Italy (93 delegates), the most numerous participants came from Japan (26), together with Greece (21), USA (16), U.K. (10), Turkey (8), Canada (7), Germany (7), Portugal (5), India (4) and New Zealand (4).
The conference was opened with the addresses by prof. Pedro Seco e Pinto (on behalf of the President of ISSMGE), Prof. Kyriazis Pitilakis (Chairman of the Conference Scientific Committee), Prof. Michele Maugeri (Chairman of the Conference Organizing Committee), and Prof. Stefano Aversa (President of AGI, Italian Geotechnical Society).
The State-of-Art Lecturers were: K. Ishihara (Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan), M. Jamiolkowski (Politecnico of Torino, Italy), G. M. Calvi (University of Pavia and EUCENTRE, Pavia, Italy), G. Gazetas (National Technical University of Athens, Greece), and K. Pitilakis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece).
Photo 1 Main entrance of the conference venue
Photo 2 Technical exhibition in patio
Download ISSMGE Bulletin – Volume 6 Issue 4 (pp. 23-25)
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