Innovation doesn’t happen on its own—it’s powered by dreamers with vision and determination. In 2024, we highlighted individuals and teams making real change in infrastructure. Here are five of those people and teams shaping the future.
Leveling Up: How Patrick Cozzi’s Love for Graphics Led to Cesium’s Game-Changing Visualization Tech
Patrick Cozzi, founder of Cesium, parlayed a passion for gaming and graphics into the development of trailblazing 3D geospatial technology—transforming how we visualize, analyze, and interact with the world and everything in it. Cesium’s 3D Tiles technology is a groundbreaking open standard format that enables unprecedented accuracy in real-time immersive visualizations of large-scale environments from detailed urban landscapes to the Moon.
Bentley Systems acquired Cesium in September 2024 to leverage the potential of 3D Tiles for digital twin initiatives and Cozzi was appointed Bentley’s chief platform officer. “Together, we’re going to bring the immersive, game-like experiences that Cesium is known for into real-world applications, from smart cities to sustainable infrastructure development,” Cozzi says.
Four The Record: This Bentley Engineer Raced Across America On Her Bike To Break A Guinness World Record And Promote STEM Among Young Women
The Four the Record teammates celebrate at the race finish line.Katie Aguilar and her three female teammates set a Guinness World Record last summer at the grueling 3,063-mile Race Across America (RAAM). They rode their bikes from Oceanside, California, to Atlantic City, New Jersey, in six days, 19 hours and 38 minutes. The grueling route climbs more than 170,000 vertical feet over three major mountain ranges. Riders cross four of the country’s biggest rivers and navigate busy highways and city traffic in the ultimate test of endurance and grit.
The “Four the Record” team raised money for Inspiring Girls International, an organization that pairs girls with female role models from all walks of life.
Aguilar, who works as geospatial engineer at Seequent, an Atlanta-based subsidiary of Bentley Systems, worked her way up to senior application engineer during her 13-year tenure at the company. The 17-time Ironman triathlete believes in the power of showing up as a role model in both science and male-dominated sports like cycling. “Representation matters,” she says. “If you see someone like you doing something, you’re like, ‘Oh, I can do that too.’ It’s somewhere I belong.”
The Time Traveler: Bentley’s Resident Visionary Gives the Infrastructure Industry a Glimpse of its Future
As vice president of Bentley Systems’ Emerging Technology Group, Greg Demchak and his team built a detailed digital twin of London at the company’s innovation lab, or iLab. The virtual model combines geospatial and engineering data with the latest gaming technology, allowing users to zoom around the city.
At the 2024 Year in Infrastructure and Going Digital Awards in Vancouver, Demchak’s team created an immersive exhibit that walked attendees through the history of infrastructure. The interactive exhibit also showed how generative AI can transform architecture and the sector at large.
Demchak, who has a degree in design and computation in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has dedicated his career to making tools that enable people to create, visualize, and interact with digital versions of the built environment. “We’re just getting started,” he says.
Roads Scholar: A Broken Traffic Light Launched This Bentley AI Executive On a Quest to Change How We Maintain Our Roadways
Blyncsy’s interstate highway map can detect over 40 different road conditions and asset inventory issues.More than a decade ago, Mark Pittman got stuck in Salt Lake City gridlock due to a broken traffic light. The frustrating experience gave the MBA and law student an entrepreneurial idea that ultimately led to the launch of Blyncsy, which uses AI, machine vision, and cloud computing to monitor street conditions, find problematic spots, and help departments of transportation maintain road networks through intelligent, near-real-time insights.
Blyncsy, which Bentley Systems acquired in August 2024, crowdsources dashcam images from more than 1 million vehicles, including privately owned commercial and fleet vehicles, and delivery trucks. The system, then anonymizes the data and securely stores it in the cloud to be analyzed by machine learning systems and AI.
From Sinatra Swagger to Infrastructure Fever: How Chris Barron and His Resonant Bass Bridged Entertainment and Engineering
As Bentley’s chief communications officer, Chris Barron used his Sinatra-like singing voice, and Rat Pack charm — to transform the company’s annual summit into a can’t-miss date on the infrastructure industry calendar.
In 2009, Barron surprised the audience at what’s now called the Year in Infrastructure and Going Digital Awards with a topical remake of the 1956 R&B hit, “Fever”. And the rest, as they say, is history. Learn how the creative crooner, who retired in 2019, leveraged both his master’s degree in architecture from Harvard and lifelong love of music to bridge the worlds of entertainment and infrastructure during his 13-year Bentley tenure.
