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Tom Beach

Dr Tom Beach

Reader in Construction Informatics

School of Engineering

Email
BeachTH@cardiff.ac.uk
Telephone
+44 29208 75796
Campuses
Queen's Buildings - South Building, Room S0.12, 5 The Parade, Newport Road, Cardiff, CF24 3AA
Users
Available for postgraduate supervision

Overview

I am a reader in Construction Informatics, I hold a PhD in Computer Science and have been working in the built environment research field for over 8 years.

I am passionate about applying state of the art computing technologies to deliver a safer, more efficient, more resilient built environment.

My research focuses on innovation in the built environment field underpinned by state of the art computing technologies. This combination of a background in Computer Science, a solid grounding in the built environment field, and expertise in Building Information Modelling (BIM) and built environment semantics, makes me ideally placed to conduct research towards creating a more intelligent, efficient and adaptable built environment.

More specifically, my research interests include: (a) specification and implementation of building/district/city data storage, (b) the Internet of Things(IoT) and its application to the monitoring and control of the built environment, (c) data analytics including machine learning and artificial intelligence, (d) application of cloud/distributed computing to data storage and processing for built environment applications and (e) the semantics of data within the built environment.

I am also heavily involved in the development of the Computation Urban Sustainability Platform and am the technical lead for this project.

I am currently conducted several funded research projects in these areas, and am active in publishing ( I have over 30 academic papers in peer reviewed journals) and reviewing papers. I am also available for postgraduate research supervision - please see Supervision for more information.

Related Links

https://www.cuspplatform.com/

https://www.dcom.org.uk/

Publication

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

2010

2009

Articles

Book sections

Conferences

Thesis

Research

Contracts

Title People Sponsor Value Duration
Discipline Hoppping for Freshwater Solutions Durance, I, Beach T etc al NERC £65k 1/1/2022->30/4/2022
Utilising Innovative Methods of Data Capture for Regulatory Compliance Checking Beach T RIF £25k 1/1/2022->1/8/2022
Digitising Construction Regulations Beach T, Rezgui Y Construction Innovation Hub £480k 1/7/20->31/6/2022
Attenuating the Environmental Impact of our Buildings through Semantic-based Dynamic Life cycle Assessment (SemanticLCA) Rezgui Y, Beach T, Petri I EPSRC £640k 1/6/20->30/5/2022
Evidence-based market and policy instruments implementation across the EU to increase the demand for energy skills across construction sector value chain Rezgui Y, Beach T, Petri I European commission - H2020 £105k 01/06/20 ->30/05/22
Utilising Innovative Methods of Data Capture for Regulatory Compliance Checking Beach T, Rezgui Y ESRC(via UCL) £90k 1/2/20->31/7/20
Towards a European Digital Platform for Construction Rezgui Y, Beach T, Petri I European commission - H2020 £15k 01/09/19 -> 28/02/21
Digitisation of Requirements, Regulations and Compliance Checking Processes in the Built Environment Beach T, Rezgui Y Centre for Digital Built Britian £55k 01/7/18 -> 22/12/18
WISDOM Water analytics and intelligent sensing for demand optimised management Rezgui Y, Kwan A, Li H, Mourshed M, Beach T European Commission (FP7) £352,687 01/02/2014 - 31/01/2017
BRE Studentship Rezgui Y, Li H, Beach T BRE Trust £19,846 01/04/2012 - 31/03/2015
Clouds4Coordination: Cloud Based project co-ordination in the AEC Sector Prof O Rana (COMSC), Prof Y Rezgui, Beach T TSB via BRE £76,609 07/01/2013 - 31/12/2016

Supervised Students

Title Student Status Degree
EVALUATING FOR ENERGY EFFICIENCY OF EXISTING BUILDINGS ENVELOPE USING REMOTE SENSING Amin Amin Current PhD
Generative Design Driven by Construction Regulations Jonathan Yeung Current PhD
Smart Readiness Indicators Majid Yahya Al Mughairi Current PhD
Spatially Disaggregated Building Stock Model of The UK Residential Sector Adnan Hossain Current PhD
MULTI-SOURCE FUSION OF BIG DATA FOR REAL-TIME SUSTAINABILITY Salem Khodair Algarni Current PhD
Managing BIM based Sustainable Construction Adoption in Saudi Araabia Mushref Saad A Alghamdi Current PhD
Cyber Security in Digital Twins and Cyber Physical Systems Kaznah Alshammari Current PhD
MODELLING EMBODIED ENERGY OF HOUSING STOCK. ELALWANI Eman Mohamed Ali Graduated MPhil
Water Behaviour Modelling For Efficient ICT-Based Water Management In Urban Environments TERLET Julia Jeanne Louise Graduated PhD
BIM BASED COST OPTIMISATION OF GREEN BUILDINGS. MOHSIN Marwah Submitted PhD
BIM-Based Smart Compliance Checking to Enhance Environmental Sustainability KASIM Tala Graduated PhD

Teaching

I am currently Civil Engineering MSc Tutor, looking after the day to day running of all civil engineering MSc Courses.

I also teach the following undergraduate courses:

  • Civil Engineering Computing I - Basic Programming and Applications of Computing in the Built Environment
  • Computing II - Advanced Programming and Introduction to BIM technologies in the built environment
  • Engineering Analysis - Numerical Methods and their implementation in computer programming.

Biography

I achieved my PhD degree in Computer Science in 2011. Between 2011 and 2014 I worked on a variety of projects related to BIM as a post doctoral research fellow. I have worked as a academic at Cardiff University since 2014.

Professional memberships

Member of the British Computer Society

Fellow of the Higher Education Society

Academic positions

My career as an academic includes:

2014->2018 - Lecturer - Cardiff University

2018->2020 -  Senior Lecturer - Cardiff University

2020->Present - Reader - Cardiff University

Committees and reviewing

I was the chair of the organizing committee for European wide PRO-VE 2018 conference. The conference attracted, 80+ internationally reputable academics and proceedings of the conference were published as a book by Springer. My role was to coordinate all local arrangements for the conference as well as assisting the program chairs in formulating the scientific program and chairing a special track session within the conference.

I am also conference co-chair for the IEEE ICE 2020/2021 conference that was hosted virutally in 2020 and will be hosted physically in Cardiff in 2021. As part of this event, in addition to managing local arrangements, I am be responsible for allocating peer review, and making decisions on the formulation of the scientific programme. The ICE conference regularly attracts 120+ academics and industrialists from across Europe and the world.

I am also a reviewer for the following international journals:

  • Journal of Expert Systems with Applications
  • Journal of Civil Engineering and Management
  • Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering
  • Journal of Hydrology
  • Journal of Future Generations of Computer Systems
  • Automation in Construction
  • IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
  • Energies
  • Journal of Cloud Computing
  • Semantic Web Journal
  • Advanced Engineering Informatics
  • Water

I am a member of the EPSRC peer review colleage and I am on the Program Committee for the International IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies

Supervisions

I am interesting in supervising PhDs involving the following areas:

  • Application of optimisation, machine learning, and AI in the built environment.
  • Use cases for structured asset data (BIM)
  • Automation of regulatory/sustainability assessments in the built environment
  • Application of distributed leger (blockchain) for contracting/integrity applications in the built environment
  • Semantics in the Built Environment
  • Application of BIM technologies and tools within the BIM environment.

Even if your idea is not precidely aligned to these areas - please get in touch - it may still be something I can supervise (or co-supervise with a colleague).