Our Civil Systems Manifesto

The objective of the Civil Systems program is to train leaders and professionals who will be able to design, build, manage, operate and implement systems (large and small) that behave as desired, achieving their intended performance goals efficiently as planned. The educational mission of the systems program is to encourage vertical integration of tools and technologies, and make it possible for students with existing degrees in branches of engineering and science to earn a graduate degree in Civil Engineering. The glue that holds a degree earned in the systems program together is the research work on a civil engineering problem.

Our guiding principles in defining this program are: (1) that our programs should have a unique "signature" that cannot be imparted by other departments, (2) that they should be flexible enough to encompass areas normally considered beyond the scope of CEE, and (3) that they should not replicate what can already be done within the traditional programs. The department has formed the program from a CEE professor and the hiring of two faculty members, each with a Ph.D. in a non-civil discipline, and with a set of research in areas far outside of traditional CEE pursuits. The department believes that their presence will lead to a broadening and expansion of our research mission through the melding of the new tools and study areas of the extended systems faculty and the more traditional areas of CEE. We believe that in order for CEE to grow, we must attract students from other branches of science and engineering. The students and faculty both are attracted to help solve our very challenging and societal-centric CEE problems, using their powerful tools from other disciplines. All this means that the graduate students need to take a much different set of courses than the department has traditionally seen.

The Civil Systems program is a growing program, and is serving as a guiding light to CEE programs here and abroad. The program is still feeling its way through the thicket of possibilities - how do we maximize flexibility while maintaining the needed modicum of structure. It is realized that this requires some different rules than traditional in order to maintain the inter/multi-disciplinarily of the researchers. In some cases the student arrives already focused on, say, some area of mathematics that might lead to new tools to solve control of multiple sensor-drifters in the delta in order to compute salinity levels and current in real time. That student might need a minimum number of traditional CEE courses in order to complete their research. Other students come from a CEE background and will work on more traditional projects, such as inversion of nanoseismic waveforms to map source kinematics within a fracturing solid. It is natural for this student to take more CEE courses, but the student will be pushed to take many courses - more than a minor - outside the department. This would include wave propagation and inversion courses in EPS, fracture mechanics in MSE, signal processing courses in EECS and Statistics, etc.

The hallmark of our systems student should be expertise in an abstract science and a domain. Departments such as computer science are defined by abstractions, e.g., computing, information, networking, etc. This training makes a CS PhD’s work relevant to many applications, e.g., cars, buildings, cellular biology, and so on. Civil PhD’s by contrast have traditionally been defined by an industry, e.g., road transportation, air transportation, water resources, structural design. Transportation uses Queuing theory tools but might not advance Queuing theory. This is done by IEOR, another department defined by abstractions.

PhD’s from departments defined completely by abstractions will often say unrealistic things about applications. Their knowledge of any particular worldly domain is superficial, though after graduation they learn an industry and overcome this. Their abstract training allows them to move through several industries during a career. By contrast a Civil Ph.D. has deep knowledge of an industry on graduation, but lack of abstract training most often ties them to that industry for life.

The Civil Systems Ph.D. is an attempt to produce students trained in both an abstraction and a domain. They will be able to do high impact work in their domain right from day one. Moreover, the abstract component of the training will enable them to also move through several industries over a career. They can also use the abstract training to innovate industries.

An ideal Civil Systems Ph.D. student should advance both a domain and abstraction in their thesis. For example, Marco Zennaro worked on distributed computing for traffic signal control. His work advances the theory of distributed computing. This part of his work should appear in computer science journals. He is also advancing traffic signal control. This part of his work should appear in transportation journals. Dr. Zennaro is currently working at Google Research. Likewise Siva Sitheram’s work appeared in ASCE journals and some of it has been submitted to an optimization theory journal. His domain has been UAV's and infrastructure inspection. His abstraction is control and optimization. He is currently a professor of Civil Engineering at Texas A. & M. University. Thus a civil systems student should publish both theoretical and applied work in the journals of the respective communities.

In order to encompass the many scales of the abstract and the domain of civil engineering problems, the guidelines for course work should be as flexible as possible while maintaining intellectual rigor and development of in-depth knowledge by the student. In order to support the faculty research and to produce a new type of engineer, we have a program where the students will take a core of CEE Systems courses, 271, 290I, 291F. The remainder of the “major” field of study might be in our department, except for essential related courses in other departments, in several departments, or in an interdisciplinary group. Once the student has chosen a field of study, they confer with the systems graduate adviser and their thesis advisor to select the sequence of courses that will best prepare them for the qualifying examination and research work. For our program to remain multidisciplinary, we must define our “major” as a multidisciplinary mix of the systems civil core and, possibly other courses taken outside the department. This is done for strict academic purposes, not as an easy way out for the student.

We look at our circumstances as a strongly positive reflection on the department. We have a healthy program of more than twenty graduate students who would not be in our department without Civil Systems. They are top performing students who get top jobs. Our first Ph.D. graduate is now a professor at GaTech with a joint appointment in CEE and EE. Another went to UIUC as a faculty member, another is a NASA researcher at Ames. Another student getting ready to graduate has a job at Google. Several others have started successful companies.

As the top program at the top college in the top university, it is our responsibility to renew and redefine CEE. By integrating tools from outside the department we grow our purview and can co-opt the toolmakers. For example, the last several hires in EECS have been in systems biology. In this case EECS is redefining themselves by what their faculty does, rather than by what they don’t do. We must remember that what made our department great were the visionaries that brought higher math and statistics to structural engineering, who showed that engineering mechanics could provide such powerful tools for structural engineers. In our own small way we are trying to do the same.