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Infrastructure Is About People, Not Concrete: How Leaders Are Rethinking What We Build, Where We Build, and How We Pay For it

Nothing is certain except death and taxes, the cliché goes. But even taxes come with surprises—like the cost of crumbling infrastructure. “When we fail to invest in infrastructure, that’s a hidden tax we pay today,” said Tom Smith, executive director of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). “Instead of paying a real tax that would produce something, we’re paying in response to infrastructure that is non-performing.” Smith estimates this hidden tax costs each American family around $2,000 a year—and could increase to $2,700 “if we fail to continue the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act investments that we have today.” Smith spoke at the recent Transforming Infrastructure Performance (TIP) forum in New York City, a global gathering seeking to “bring together the best minds in infrastructure.” Attendees included Maryland Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller, who spoke about the effort to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore; Uzoamaka N. Okoye, chief of staff for the New Terminal One at JFK airport, who discussed the complexities and challenges of building a brand-new terminal at one of the world’s busiest airports while keeping flights running; and Tom Curtin, senior policy advisor at the investment firm Meridiam, who talked about funding sustainable and

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Zoom In, Scale Up: Why Infrastructure Innovators Are Turning to Cesium’s 3D Geospatial Tech

Mark Pittman parlayed his frustration with a broken traffic light into a pioneering startup that today uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine vision, and cloud computing to help maintain the nation’s roads more intuitively and effectively. Since its launch in 2014, Blyncsy has delivered intelligence and near real-time status updates to transportation departments across the U.S. and Europe, helping the agencies create safer roads for both drivers and maintenance crews. Emerging as an industry leader, Blyncsy was acquired by Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, in 2023. Now another Bentley acquisition, 3D geospatial company Cesium, is elevating the Blyncsy experience. The partnership illustrates why many architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) organizations rely on Cesium to innovate how they design, build, manage, and maintain critical infrastructure. Here’s how the partnership works: Blyncsy crowdsources images from more than 1.2 million vehicles. It stores and analyzes the data in the cloud and provides users access via open Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, that link to their platforms and transportation managements systems. This is where Cesium comes in. The company and its 3D visualization technology can quickly bring to life traffic patterns, road conditions, and infrastructure health insights found in Blyncsy’s data analysis. The

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The New Gold Rush: How Digital Tools and AI Are Reviving Abandoned Mines

In mining, billion-dollar decisions often rest on what happened months and years ago in the core shack—an unassuming shed near a potential goldmine where drill cores become data. Geologist David Newton should know. Early in his career, he spent long, cold days manually logging drill core data into sprawling Excel spreadsheets thousands of rows deep. “That’s where the rubber meets the road,” he says. “If logging errors slip through unnoticed, they can’t easily be fixed. And the crazy part is, the people logging that data are often the most junior, lowest-paid employees in the whole operation.” In any industry where data underpins important decisions, precision is everything. This is especially true in gold mining, where the stakes have never been higher. Over the past decade, gold prices have increased by over 160%. In the last six months alone, they leapt nearly 30%, surpassing the $3,500 per ounce mark for the first time in history. A golden opportunity This extraordinary rise is doing more than boosting the value of portfolios—it’s flipping the script on the economics of mining. Mines that were mothballed decades ago and deemed too expensive to continue working are suddenly gleaming with promise. “When gold booms, the calculus

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Signs Of Change: How Bentley and Google Are Transforming Roadway Maintenance and Disaster Recovery

Devastating wildfires tore through the hills surrounding Los Angeles in January, leaving emergency responders to navigate a maze of smoke, debris, and melted street signs. Familiar roads and landmarks were rendered unrecognizable. Like other densely populated areas hit by natural disasters, Los Angeles faced an agonizingly slow process of damage assessment—collecting information, conducting laborious inspections, and relying at times on guesswork to guide critical relief efforts. This traditional approach to disaster relief is quickly changing thanks to a groundbreaking collaboration between Bentley Systems and Google. This partnership provides states with better information to recover from crises by using AI-generated insights pulled from constantly updated datasets and historical records of infrastructure. And the fruits of this partnership will be applicable to many more infrastructure needs beyond disaster recovery. Solving a Massive Data Problem When Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, acquired Blyncsy, which applies AI to crowdsourced imagery for automated roadway asset detection and inventory, in 2023, it aimed to disrupt the tedious process of municipal roadway inspection. Integrating Google Maps’ robust imagery and data into Blyncsy establishes a comprehensive baseline for proactive management of everything from potholes and cracks in pavement to more serious infrastructure risks caused by disasters.

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Engineering the Future: Training the Next Generation with Some of the Most Complex Infrastructure on Earth and maybe Mars

Louisiana is no stranger to devastating storms and floods, but you’d never know it every February when New Orleans erupts in Mardi Gras, a festival of sound and color flavored with boisterous parades, jazz, and spicy crawfish boils. Locals know that beyond the beads and feathers and brass band music sits some of the most complex infrastructure on the planet, from levees and seawalls to canals and spillways, all built to protect the city surrounded by water from flooding. Keeping the system up to date is an urgent task. The latest initiative to do so is the brainchild of James Scott Fargason, a business professor at Louisiana State University, and his former student, Russell J. “Joey” Coco Jr., now an acclaimed infrastructure engineer and executive. The duo is leading a revolution to digitize all infrastructure, from single bridges to entire cities, with an eye toward making it “smarter” and more resilient. Their vehicle is Digi-Twin Global, a company they started in Baton Rouge, home to LSU, to advance digital twin technology for infrastructure owners, managers, and operators. “The future of digital twins is going to be what you can do with the huge amount of data that’s out there,” says

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The Civil Engineer’s Co-Pilot: At Nvidia’s “AI Woodstock,” Bentley Executive Lays Out Its Vision for the Future of AI In Infrastructure

Some 25,000 people recently flocked to San Jose, California, for Nvidia’s GTC AI Conference. Informally known as “AI Woodstock,” the event featured Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who talked about the semiconductor giant’s latest AI chips, and AI pioneers and luminaries in artificial intelligence (AI), like Meta’s Yann LeCun, Caltech’s Frances Arnold and Mistral AI’s Arthur Mensch. “It’s essentially the AI conference,” says Francois Valois, vice president for Open Applications at Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company. “There’s no better forum to talk about AI because everyone working on generative AI is using Nvidia chips.” That includes Bentley, a leader in applying AI to infrastructure engineering. Valois flew to San Jose to speak on a panel addressing the role of AI and data in shaping architecture, civil engineering, construction and infrastructure maintenance. His team developed and launched Bentley’s groundbreaking AI and generative AI products like OpenSite+. This design co-pilot is already helping site civil engineers to reduce the cost and the environmental impact of data centers, industrial facilities and other large construction projects. Joining Valois on the panel, which was hosted by Nvidia, were experts from the design software firms Autodesk, Nemetschek and Trimble. Valois discussed the AI applications that

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Protecting The Big Easy: This Year’s Mardi Gras Showed Again How Infrastructure And Digital Twins Can Help Keep New Orleans Safe and Dry

New Orleans is home to awe-inspiring music, food and street parties. But let’s not forget equally awe-inspiring infrastructure, which keeps the Big Easy dry. That was evident in early March when New Orleans entered “Deep Gras,” the boisterous coda to months of revelry culminating in Fat Tuesday, the end of the Mardi Gras season. Sitting on land near and below sea level and surrounded by water, the party could go on thanks to a ring of levees, floodgates, pump stations, spillways and other infrastructure. Many of these structures were built or reinforced after the catastrophic flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, including the city’s new “Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System,” a 130-mile-long flood wall completed in 2022. Dubbed as the “great wall of New Orleans,” the concrete and steel wall is the largest project in U.S. Army Corps history. “We have the most robust and complex infrastructure here in Louisiana, especially around the city of New Orleans,” says Joey Cocco, president and CEO of the Louisiana engineering firm Forte & Tablada. “The city started in the highest point here, the French Quarter, and it grew out from there. The levees and other infrastructure form a system that

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Fixing America’s Bridges: AI and The Digital Revolution in Infrastructure Design and Maintenance

I traveled to the U.S. in November to meet my team at Bentley Systems headquarters just outside Philadelphia. I am a senior product marketing manager in Europe at Bentley, the infrastructure engineering software company, and I specialize in software for building and maintaining bridges. I am a curious person, so while away from my home in Romania, I decided to explore Philadelphia. I love infrastructure and, naturally, I was drawn to the city’s bridges. Walking around, I couldn’t help but notice the ongoing repair work on aging bridges around the city. One afternoon, as I walked beneath the rusted steel beams of an 80-year-old bridge, I watched a team of inspectors at work. It was fascinating: They hung from safety harnesses, taking photos, writing notes on clipboards, and occasionally tapping spots they deemed suspicious with hammers. It’s the same inspection routine bridge engineers have used for decades. “We’ll be lucky to finish three bridges this week,” said one of the inspectors. “And we’ve got 43 more on our list before winter hits.” This is hard and important work. Across the U.S., over 220,000 bridges desperately need major repairs or full replacement. I chatted with the inspectors about Bentley’s software and

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Smart Heat: A Digital Twin Helps a College Town Move Toward Carbon Neutrality. Are big cities next?

Ithaca is a picturesque town in upstate New York famous for its waterfalls and gorges, and the world-renowned Cornell University. The area has long been hailed as a beacon of progress. Cornell’s students and scientists, for example, helped discover that water once flowed on Mars, built the first fully functioning synthetic human ear, and learned from famed astronomer Carl Sagan. Now, Ithaca and its 32,000 residents have big plans to extend their innovative legacy by leading in urban decarbonization. The city has decided to replace its fossil fuel-burning infrastructure, like boilers and stoves, with electric-powered heat pumps and induction cookers. The work is planned for all of the city’s 5,500 buildings, with the goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2030. The plan is to reach 100% electrification as efficiently and economically as possible—and at the center of the project is a digital twin. The digital urban building energy model was developed by researchers from Cornell’s Environmental System Lab and the Rocky Mountain Institute. Part of the work is sponsored by Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company and a leader in digital twins and artificial intelligence (AI) for infrastructure. Bentley is also helping share lessons learned from the project with

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Breaking Barriers, Cutting Carbon: The Engineer Helping Infrastructure and Women Reach Net Zero

Many engineers have stories of meetings getting off to a rocky start. For Victoria Fillingham, one began with being mistaken for the coffee server. “I’ve seen a big change,” she says, “but I can tell you stories about being the facilitator of a meeting—bringing all these people together—only for some chaps to walk in, hand me their tea and coffee orders, and expect me to fetch them. I’d say, ‘This is my meeting. The tea and coffee machine is down there. Help yourself. We’ll wait until you’re back and settled.’” That meeting was just one of the hurdles along Fillingham’s long and accomplished engineering journey—one that began with an engineering epiphany in elementary school. That moment led her to a degree in architecture and environmental engineering, followed by a doctorate. Today, she works in the Advisory Services unit of Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company and a leader in digital twins. She’s also a champion for women pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). On International Women’s Day, March 8, Fillingham emphasizes that more still needs to be done to inspire the next generation of girls to enter science and engineering fields. Inspiring Girls toward STEM  Fillingham

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