Ranjith K SOMAN

Researcher of Circular Future Cities

Assistant Professor at TU Delft

Dr. Ranjith Soman is an Assistant Professor of Digital Construction at TU Delft, who is also a senior researcher in the Circular Future Cities research module in the Future Cities Lab Global programme and at the Chair of Innovative and Industrial Construction at ETH Zurich. In addition, he serves as an honorary research associate at Imperial College London

Trained as a civil engineer, he received his Master’s by research in Building Technology and Construction Management from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. After his Master’s, he worked as a project assistant in the Building Automation Lab at IIT Madras to coordinate the development of a robotic system for self-assembly of columns and beams. He then moved to the Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation at Imperial College London, where he did a PhD which focused on knowledge codification, semantic-web technologies, and reinforcement learning to improve construction productivity in an infrastructure context.

During his PhD, he developed a novel Linked-data based Constraint-Checking (LDCC) to identify possible blockers for smooth construction execution by deriving insights and from a large amount of heterogeneous disconnected datasets. He also spent an exchange semester at the Alan Turing Institute to combine LDCC with reinforcement learning to predict and generate conflict-free construction plans for infrastructure projects. After his PhD, he spent a year as a post-doctoral researcher at the same centre to implement and disseminate his research output to the industry through an InnovateUK funded project.

As an academic, Ranjith is passionate about applying semantic web technologies, systems thinking, and artificial intelligence in civil infrastructure and is keen to educate the next generation of infrastructure professionals on the importance of embedding information technology within the scope of the traditional functions of existing core professional service. In addition, he aspires to have an academic career to research and drive innovation for a step-change in infrastructure sustainability.

Research Interests

• Circular economy in the built environment
• Industrialized construction
• Extended reality in the built environment
• Construction robotics and informatics
• Systems engineering
• Lean construction

Publications

View Ranjith's list of publications external pagehere.

Awards

Best poster award awarded by Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation, Imperial College London at their annual Industry Showcase event in London UK, November 2019
Second place for Three-minute thesis competition awarded by the European Council on Computing in Construction at their 2019 European Conference on Computing in Construction (EC³ 2019), Chania, Greece, July 2019
First Place for Linked-Data in Architecture and Construction Hackathon awarded by Linked Building Data Community Group at their 2019 Linked data in architecture and construction conference, Lisbon, Portugal, June 2019
Top 3 Finalist for Max Boisot Award awarded by the European Group for Organizational Studies at their 2020 European Group for Organizational Studies Colloquium, Hamburg, Germany, 2020
Alan Turing PhD Enrichment Award awarded by the The Alan Turing Institute- UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence for exemplary PhD work in artificial intelligence, London, UK, 2018
Skempton scholarship (£71,500) awarded by Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London for exceptional PhD proposals, London UK, December 2016
Postgraduate research scholarship (£5,500) awarded by Ministry of Human Resource Development, India for exceptional MSc students, Chennai India, July 2013.

Education

PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering,Imperial College London, United Kingdom, March 2017-September 2020
PhD Enrichment Scholar, The Alan Turing Institute, United Kingdom, September 2018-March 2019
Research MSc in Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), India, July 2013-May 2016
BTech in Civil Engineering, University of Calicut, India, August 2009-June 2013