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International Bridge Conference 2012

On Monday, I returned to Delft from the International Bridge Conference 2012.

In two poster sessions, I’ve presented the poster which you can see here, and that was the very first time I gave a poster presentation (I’ll be blogging about that experience shortly).

The International Bridge Conference is held yearly in Pittsburgh, the city of bridges. The website describes the conference as follows:

“Sponsored by the Engineers’ Society of Western Pennsylvania, the IBC annually attracts over 1,600 bridge owners and engineers, senior policy makers, government officials, bridge designers, construction executives, and suppliers from throughout the United States and abroad.”

I indeed very much enjoyed the combination of bridge owners, practicing engineers from structural engineering firms, researchers and construction companies. With a 160 exhibitors at the conference, there is plenty of information from practitioners to gather – I didn’t have enough eyes and ears.

As can be seen in this overview, the conference offers 3 technical sessions at a time, workshops, poster presentations, exhibits and (at an additional cost) seminars. I’ve attended 2 workshops, presentations at the technical sessions, visited the grand majority of all booths at the exhibit and presented my poster twice – a very packed schedule indeed.

What I’ve enjoyed most about this conference is the link to practice, and the impressive new bridge projects that are shown. Moreover, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to practicing engineers from the USA about slab bridges, and I’ve learned more about the way slab bridges are built in North-American practice. However, I’m still looking for some example cross-sections of reinforced concrete slab bridges from North America to compare to the cases I am studying from the Netherlands.

If possible (thesis-planning-wise), I’ll try to go back to this conference next year, hopefully to present in one of the technical sessions.

If you’re planning to attend IBC in 2013, the abstracts will be due (I expect) in early fall 2012.

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This Post Has 2 Comments
  1. This is my first time reading your blog and I am enjoying it. I wanted to ask though, why does the poster have so much text? As a passerby I do not think I would want to read it based on just looking at it

  2. As I wrote in another post http://phdtalk.blogspot.nl/2012/06/giving-poster-presentation-for-first.html , this was the first poster presentation I gave. I had been looking for clues on the internet, and got some great advice on the #phdchat. However, I did pick up from a random internet site that it should take the viewers 5 to 10 minutes to read the contents. That, and the fact that the poster ends up in the proceedings made me want to add more in-depth explanation to it.I'm not satisfied with the overall look of the poster though 🙂

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