PhD Student Houtan Jebelli Awarded the Charles M. Eastman Top PhD Paper Award

Civil and Environmental Engineering PhD student Houtan Jebelli was awarded by the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building Construction (CIB) with the Charles M. Eastman Top PhD Paper Award for his paper “Mobile EEG-based Workers’ Stress Recognition by Applying Deep Neural Network.” This award serves as the best paper award for the CIB W78 Conference on IT in Design, Construction, and Management. Jebelli is advised by Associate Professor SangHyun Lee, who is also co-author of the award-winning paper.

Jebelli received this award at the CIB’s W78 Conference on IT in Design, Construction, and Management. CIB was formed to stimulate and facilitate the international cooperation and exchange of information between governmental research institutes in the building and construction sector. The W78 Conference took place from October 1st-3rd in Chicago. This year’s conference topics focused on intelligent and autonomous systems, computer support in design and construction, and information integration and informatics.

The Charles M. Eastman Top PhD Paper Award was created on behalf of Charles M. Eastman, a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. Eastman is a pioneer of Architecture, Engineering, Construction Computer Aided-Design (AEC CAD). He has been a strong supporter of the W78 conferences since 1988.

Jebelli’s paper focuses on a procedure to automatically recognize workers’ stress in construction sites using EEG signals. Jebelli and his co-authors collected construction field workers’ EEG signals and preprocessed them to capture high-quality signals. They also applied several supervised learning algorithms to recognize workers’ stress while they are working at sites. Jebelli is also an active member in CEE’s Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC).