The intent of organizing the international conference is to provide tremendous opportunities to academics, researchers, and practising engineers to share scientific knowledge, industrial experiences, and research outcomes.

School of Civil Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology organized a three days International conference on “Recent Trends in Construction Materials and Structures” (ICON2019), from 18th to 20thSeptember. Dr. G. Viswanathan, the founder and Chancellor of VIT inaugurated the conference by lighting the Deepam in the presence of the Chief Guest, Thiru P.G. Venkatram, Chief Executive of L&T Infrastructural Engineering Ltd., Chennai. Our chancellor, during his presidential address, he comprehended the importance of civil engineering and added that it was the first established department at VIT. He also cited that civil engineering being the mother of all engineering branches will always subsist to show its prominence in this word. He informed the gathering about the humongous investment plan of the Indian Government in infrastructure development and how it creates opportunities to civil engineers for building their careers in this field. A conference Souvenir was released by the Chancellor and the Chief Guest.
Thiru P.G. Venkatram has nearly 30 years of experience in design of bridges. He is involved in the design of a number of cutting-edge cable supported bridges. In his inaugural address, he reiterated the importance of being a civil engineer. He called civil engineering as the “glue that holds all the society together.” He appreciated the delegates for coming forward and presenting their research and informed that their work has to go through a lot of steps such as testing, prototyping, validation and checks on safety and reliability before being used in practice. He said that “knowledge shared is knowledge multiplied” and appreciated the organizers for this opportunity to share knowledge.
The conference had some keynote speeches from eminent speakers, Dr. Choong kok Keong, Associate professor Universiti Sains Malaysia, Dr. Lau Hieng Ho, Professor and Pro-Vice Chancellor, Swinburne University of Technology, Malaysia, Dr. Prachand Man Pradhan, Associate Professor, Kathmandu University, Nepal and Dr.Radhey Sharma, Professor, West Virginia University, USA.
As a part of the event, a pre-conference workshop on “characterization and micro-structure analysis of concrete” has been organized with 80 participants form institutions across India on 17th September 2019. The resource persons, Dr. Manu Santhanam, IIT Madras, Dr. B.B. Das, NIT Karnataka and Dr. J Karthikeyan, NIT Trichy have delivered thought-provoking lectures. A technical design contest namely Make-A-Thon was conducted where 96 students of VIT, formed into 16 groups, exhibited their creativity in all the five themes provided to them. The best design model was awarded with a cash prize of Rs. 6000
The scientific committee of ICON 2019 received more than 100 research abstracts. After peer reviewing all the abstracts, 52 delegates are presenting their research paper in the conference. Eventually, selected papers will be submitted to SCOPUS indexed publications namely, ACI Material Journal and Disaster Advances and Springer’s Proceedings for consideration for publication.

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ICON2019 PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP

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